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.
01:52DPP to review...
02:08DPP
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