Day 097 - 06 Mar 95 - Page 14
1 Defendants' witness should after all turn up in court.
2
3 My Lord, I can illustrate it in this way why in the end it
4 may turn out to be of benefit. I should add, it is, if
5 I may use a colloquialism, no skin off the Defendants'
6 nose; on the contrary, it confers a benefit on them if they
7 will agree or are directed by your Lordship to go through
8 this simple procedure, that they know who is coming to
9 court for certain.
10
11 My Lord, one can test it in this way: If one looks at the
12 index for the employment witnesses, one can see page 10 of
13 the yellow section. One can see, for example, that under
14 section E which, I have to say, is the section which
15 troubles us most, given our recent experience with one of
16 those witnesses, that a number of the Plaintiffs'
17 witnesses, for example, Ann Reid, Mark Hathaway and
18 Jeanette Rowe all deal with one witness for the
19 Defendants.
20
21 If that one witness for the Defendants does not indicate
22 that he is coming to court or says that he is not, then
23 I need not call those three witnesses at all, unless by
24 chance he did after all come to court. There are other
25 similar overlaps. Jane Jarvis and Janet Eadie, both deal
26 with Logan; the first two both deal with Donnahue.
27
28 So, there would be considerable savings in time and expense
29 if it turned out that we did not after all have to call a
30 proportion of our witnesses.
31
32 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes, thank you. Mr. Morris, I would like to
33 hear what you have to say about that suggestion, but I also
34 would be interested in whether you have actually thought in
35 any event about whether it might be to your advantage,
36 certainly not to your disadvantage, if in that section of
37 case, employment, you call your witnesses first or at least
38 call your witnesses insofar as they refer to specific
39 incidents rather than policy or general practice first.
40
41 The reason I have raised that is that if you do that you at
42 least know what evidence you have actually managed to put
43 before the court in relation to specific incidents. I
44 mean, it is rather different if you have someone like --
45 just to take a name out of the air -- Mr. Hopkins; you know
46 he has shown a definite interest in the case, you are
47 absolutely confident he is going to come along and he is
48 going to say what is in his statement and may be more
49 besides. I would like you to tell me about that as well as
50 answering what Mr. Rampton has said.
51
52 MR. MORRIS: First of all, we do not object to sending out that
53 form to our witnesses. Whether we have the time to do it
54 before Easter is another question.
55
56 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It is helpful to say you do not object to the
57 form. I am not necessarily suggesting you should do it
58 during the week -- maybe when Mr. Rampton said "next week"
59 he did not just mean this one, he meant next week as the
60 week after this as well -- but if we are going to get any
