In the present case, the applicant's trial was gravely affected by unfairness and error. The indictment joined together charges relating to two distinct incidents involving sexual attacks which should not, as a matter of fairness, have been joined. The evidence which was admissible on the charges relating to the first incident involving a degrading sexual attack upon a woman ("T.") should not have been placed before a jury charged to determine the applicant's guilt or innocence of the charges relating to the subsequent attack upon another woman ("H."). The members of the jury were wrongly instructed by the learned trial judge that, if they thought the two incidents were so strongly similar that it must have been the same person who perpetrated each, they could pay regard to the highly prejudicial material relating to the attack on T. in determining the applicant's guilt or innocence of the offences involving H. As the Crown now concedes, that direction was wrong for the reason that, as a matter of law and regardless of the jury's view of factual matters, the necessary foundation did not exist to permit the evidence relating to the incident involving T. to be taken into account in relation to the charges relating to the attack upon H. In these circumstances, it seems to me that the applicant's trial was so pervaded by unfairness and error in relation to the offences involving H. of which he was convicted that the conclusion is inescapable that the applicant was denied a fair trial according to law of those alleged offences. That being so, it is not to the point that the case against him in relation to those alleged offences appears, at this distance from the impact of live evidence and the atmosphere of the trial, to have been an overwhelmingly strong one. Nor is it open to an appellate court, in the circumstances of the present case, to conclude that the fact that the members of the jury were not prepared to find that the guilt of the applicant of the remaining alleged offence relating to T. was established demonstrates that they were positively satisfied that the applicant was not involved in that incident at all with the result that the evidence relating to it could not have played any part in his conviction of the offences relating to H. It is possible that the jury's acquittal of the applicant of that other offence was on some basis other than doubt about the identity of the applicant as the person involved. Quite apart from that, there is nothing in the learned trial judge's summing up or in the circumstances of the case which precludes the possibility that, even though they were not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt of the applicant's guilt of the remaining charge involving T., some or all of the members of the jury may have considered that it was more probable than not that the applicant was in fact guilty of the offence alleged in that charge and that that probability was a factor weighing against him on the question whether he was the person who had attacked H. In that regard, it is significant that the overall effect of the learned trial judge's directions to the members of the jury would seem to have been that they could take the evidence relating to the earlier attack on T. into account in relation to the alleged offences involving H. but not that they could take the evidence relating to the later attack upon H. into account in relation to the alleged offence involving T. If the members of the jury so understood those directions, the verdicts of not guilty in relation to the earlier incident but guilty in relation to the later one are consistent with a conclusion by the jury that the evidence in relation to neither incident sufficed, if viewed in isolation, to establish the applicant's guilt beyond reasonable doubt.