A JUDGE has criticised a catalogue of errors by prosecutors which forced trial dates to be scrapped.
Lord Turnbull said making such changes caused inconvenience for witnesses and wasted public money.
He added there had been no apology for the mistakes and the court had been misled. This week, the High Court in Edinburgh has dealt with four applications to change trial dates.
Two alleged rapists, awaiting separate trials, appeared before the judge yesterday. One man who was about to go to trial later this month will now have to wait until January to have his full day in court. The other trial has been brought forward by a couple of weeks.
Both men are in custody.
Changing court dates can be done administratively - if Crown and defence lawyers agree - without the need for a hearing. But Lord Turnbull had insisted the reasons for the proposed changes should be discussed in open court.
The judge heard that in one case an expert's report had been overlooked because a member of the Crown Office's administrative staff had been on holiday.
The other trial had to be re-arranged because someone had failed to notice a key witness would not be available on the proposed trial date.
Lord Turnbull said he had been given no explanation of why a previous hearing had been told the Crown was ready to go to trial when it was not. "The court was misled and that is an entirely unacceptable situation," he said.
"I have not only received no explanation for that state of affairs, but I have not been tendered an apology by the advocate depute concerned."
Lord Turnbull added that public expense had been incurred unnecessarily because yesterday's hearing and the resources allocated to the previous trial dates may have been wasted.
But, he said, he had no choice but to alter the dates.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article