We must not prejudge the issues that will join the defendant and the Crown in that second trial. We must avoid the assumption that the man was guilty, was lucky to get off the first time, and if he has been acquitted the second time he is even luckier.

One would rather hope, in view of the procedures on which we embark, that the conviction rate on retrial for such offences, if we are doing our job properly, should be 99.999 per cent., but strange things always happen in the criminal justice system. In the past 30 years we have treated with the maximum opprobrium individuals who have been convicted of committing appalling offences, yet we have had to accept 19, 20, 25 or 27 years down the road that, having heaped invective on them, it appears that they are not guilty, or at least that their convictions are unsafe and unsatisfactory.

I do not rule out in this funny old world that, some time in the next 20 years, we could end up retrying someone under these provisions, only for the Court of Appeal to overturn the decision 15 years later. That is the human world that we live in. Human justice is fallible, and we must accept that.

As citizens, we must accept our rights and obligations. One of those is that one is not compensated if one has the misfortune, as an innocent person, to be put on trial and acquitted, even though the disruption to one's life might be considerable. In some cases, people's lives are destroyed, despite acquittals that the whole of society fully accepts thereafter as justified. We accept that as part of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that are visited on people. With the provisions, however, we are quite deliberately doing that twice over, because of the certainty that the correct, guilty verdict will result. Heaven knows, we have been discussing the matter for the past few days. It troubles me that when someone is acquitted again we do not say sorry in some tangible form for the disruption caused.