N V R [2017] NZCA 170

Abstract

The ongoing discourse around unfitness to stand trial still has the capacity to surprise. Occasionally, new decisions of the courts challenge the accepted orthodoxy of earlier jurisprudence in ways that foreshadow significant change — both in the way in which legal ideas are conceptualised and in the practical workings of a particular legal doctrine. N v R is such a case. Of particular interest is the adoption by the Court of Appeal of the notion of “effective participation” as the hallmark of a criminal defendant’s capacity to undertake a trial.