Simic v The Queen [1980] HCA 25

High Court of Australia Gibbs, Stephen, Mason, Murphy and Wilson JJ. Simic v The Queen [1980] HCA 25

ORDER Application for extension of time in which to lodge application for special leave to appeal granted. Application for special leave to appeal granted. Appeal dismissed.

Cur. adv. vult.

The Court delivered the following written judgment:—

Aug. 5 Gibbs, Stephen, Mason, Murphy and Wilson JJ.

This is an application for special leave to appeal from a judgment of the Full Court of the Supreme Court of Victoria dismissing an application to that Court for leave to appeal against a conviction for murder [1] .

1. [1979] V.R. 497.

The applicant, Cvetko Simic, was convicted on a charge that at Melbourne on 30th May 1978 he murdered Kathryn Eyvette Conabere. The evidence, so far as it is necessary to state it, was as follows. Mrs. Conabere was stabbed to death in her house at 51 Durrant Street, Brighton on the afternoon of 30th May 1978, probably between two and three o'clock. She had been savagely attacked, and had sustained about thirty wounds of a kind which would have caused death very quickly. The derangement of her clothing suggested that her assailant had taken a sexual interest in her, but the medical officers who examined the body found no evidence of sexual interference. In a lounge room in the house there were found an opened bottle of spumante and two drinking glasses; the bottle and one of the glasses bore the fingerprints of the applicant, and the other glass the fingerprints of Mrs. Conabere. A third glass, found in the kitchen sink, bore the fingerprints of Mrs. Conabere's husband; there was however no evidence or suggestion that the husband was in any way implicated in the crime. A boning knife, which had obviously been used in the murder, was found in the toilet bowl. The applicant, when questioned by the police on 31st May, denied that he had been in the house at 51 Durrant Street and that his fingerprints were on the bottle or the glass. At the trial he made a statement from the dock in the course of which he retracted these denials.