Canberra's legal fraternity is turning up the heat on the director of public prosecutions Victoria Engel, accusing her of wasting time and money pursuing cases that have no merit. The comments follow claims by Ms Engel that if she doesn't get more funding, she may have to abandon some cases.
00:00A basket case. That's how one prominent lawyer described the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions as the critics circled.
00:10I don't think she's doing a very good job. She's not making the tough decisions that need to be made as an effective DPP.
00:16Their beef is their claim. Ms Engle is pursuing too many cases that have no prospect of success.
00:23The DPP herself hit back, shifting the focus.
00:27It wouldn't be doing justice to those alleged victims for me to say on a quick glance that the matter shouldn't proceed.
00:34We need funding to assess matters properly.
00:37Ms Engle says the workload in her office has increased dramatically, now processing 23,000 charges annually.
00:45Many of those are sexual assault cases, which increased in the wake of a report which found only 7% of sexual assault reports were proceeding to prosecution.
00:56But the lawyers say many of the cases are doomed to fail.
01:01It takes a little courage, particularly perhaps in the current public climate, for a prosecution service to not proceed with those matters that are, in our view, quite obviously unmeritorious.
01:11It's a vexed question to decide what has merit and what does not.
01:15And the stakes are high.
01:16Peter Woodhouse says it can cost between $100,000 and $200,000 to defend a sexual assault case in the Supreme Court with a private lawyer.
01:27I accept that what we're talking about here is cases that are being run that do have no reasonable prospect of success.
01:34But the DPP says that's not the task.
01:37The test that I have to apply is are there reasonable prospects of conviction, not will it inevitably result in a conviction.
01:44The DPP has also pointed out there have already been at least two convictions from the cases that emerged from the review.
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