3 The Crown case is that the "appellant" was a man known as Duncan Lam and that the accused was his mistress. The Crown alleges that the accused spoke by telephone on a number of occasions to Duncan Lam and other men and that she was instrumental in making arrangements for the sale of heroin on the eighth of February 1999. The Crown case consists of the tapes of intercepted telephone calls, transcripts of those calls and some surveillance evidence by Federal police officers.
4 I have been told by the Crown that without the evidence of the telephone intercepts, there would be no case against the accused, since she was not at any time observed by police to be doing anything in any direct fashion with heroin.
5 Both parties have agreed, subject to some relatively minor matters, that the transcripts of the telephone calls should be regarded as being accurate. There is also agreement as to the voice of the accused being on the tapes, as well as the voice of Duncan Lam and the voices of other men. On the 8th of February 1999 Federal police arrested a number of people, including the accused and charged them with offences of dealing in heroin. Heroin was found in a motor vehicle and it is agreed that they accused referred to that motor vehicle bites registration number and description and also referred to the day on which it was intercepted, with heroin in it.
Evidence of Mr Michael Drury.
6 The Crown wishes to call evidence from Mr Michael Drury, a former New South Wales Detective Chief Inspector, who had worked for many years as an undercover officer dealing with drug offenders and who had trained other police in doing this work.
7 It is relevant to relate that on the 7th of March 2001, Judge Holt, Q.C. presided over a jury trial in which Duncan Lam and a number of other persons were charged with a conspiracy to supply heroin. The accused was referred to in the indictment, and her role was described by the Court of Criminal Appeal in the decision to which I have already referred, but she was not one of the accused at that trial.
8 That trial, concerned, the drug transaction which is the subject of the current trial, but as well is that, it concerned an additional supply of more than 13 kg of heroin, which was found in the boot of a car in a drug safe- house.
9 Mr Drury, who at that stage was still in the New South Wales Police Force, was called as an expert witness at that trial and to equip himself for that role, he was shown a large number of transcripts, which occupy two volumes in lever arch folders. He was asked to assume that the transcripts were correct renditions of telephone calls. Those asking him to perform this task gave him the identities of the persons who were speaking on the telephone. At no time did he listen to the calls.
10 At the time he was investigating a drug-related matter in New South Wales, and he knew of some of the persons involved in the Duncan Lam trial. He was shown photos of heroin seized in the car on the 8th February 1999 (i.e. the heroin in the current trial) and photos of the heroin in the boot of the car at the drug safe house. He knew who Duncan Lam was and knew that he was a drug dealer.
11 Additionally, Federal police who were investigating, Duncan Lam spoke to him about the matter shortly after the arrest in 1999 and from time to time since may have spoken to him about the matter. He has no notes of what they may have told him.
12 He took all that information into account when he expressed the opinion that he did in the 2001 trial of Duncan Lam and others. When this trial started, Mr Peter Faris Q.C., senior counsel for the accused, took objection to the admissibility of the evidence of Mr Drury. I looked at the 1999 statement and expressed the opinion that it did not comply with District Court Rules concerning the giving of expert evidence. Two further statements were prepared by Mr Drury, dated the 12th of May 2006 and the 17th of May 2006. Mr Drury was called to give evidence on the voir dire. During cross-examination, he agreed that he had regard to a large number of matters that were not mentioned in either of his statements of June 2006. In particular, he had regard to hearsay material passed on to him by police officers, he had regard to all the transcripts of evidence, which he considered contained codeword or code jargon, and to the fact that Duncan Lam was involved in the present transaction and involved in the larger 13 kg transaction. He also had regard to what he saw in some photographs of heroin that had been seized. Relying on all of this material and on his own experience and knowledge, he was able to express clear opinions that in the transcripts relied on by the Crown for the present case; there were coded references to the buying of heroin. He had no doubt that heroin was the drug that was involved.
13 Mr Faris submitted that I should not permit this evidence to be given, principally because the Crown did not intend to prove many of the facts on which Mr Drury based his opinion. Certainly the Crown case, as it was put to me, did not involve proof that Mr Lam and a number of other men were involved in a general conspiracy with the accused to sell heroin in two quite large quantities.
14 The Crown does not propose to describe Mr Lam's role in any greater detail than it is set out earlier in this judgment.
15 There is no doubt that Mr Drury gave evidence in the Lam trial, but largely with the agreement of the accused's counsel, who did not contest his qualifications as an expert witness. Mr Lam and the other persons on trial with him were all convicted and are currently serving terms of imprisonment.
Admissibility of the evidence of Mr Drury.
16 The question which I have to determine is not whether Mr Drury can properly be regarded as an expert in the subject of drugs, particularly the use by those in the drug trade of coded conversations, but whether he can be permitted to give evidence in this case in a situation where he has formed opinions for the purposes of the Lam trial on a much more extensive set of facts than the Crown intends to prove in this case, and which the Crown does not intend to put before the jury.
17 Mr Faris puts considerable reliance on the decision of the Court of Appeal in Makita Australia P/L v. Sprowles (52 NSW LR 705, particularly at paragraphs 64):
"64. The basal principle is that what an expert gives is an opinion based on facts. Because of that, the expert must either prove by admissible means the facts on which the opinion is based, or state explicitly the assumptions as to fact on which the opinion is based. If other admissible evidence establishes that the matters assumed are "sufficiently like" the matters established "to render the opinion of the expert of any value", even though they may not correspond
"with complete precision", the opinion will be admissible and material: see generally Paric v John Holland Constructions Pty Ltd [1984] 2 NSWLR 505 at 509-510; Paric v John Holland (Constructions) Pty Ltd (at 846; 87). One of the reasons why the facts proved must correlate to some degree with those assumed is that the expert's conclusion must have some rational relationship"(per Heydon J.A)