Stabbing murder accused Alex Robert Smart to face retrial due to judge’s misdirection of the jury

A Queensland man serving life in jail for the stabbing murder of a father of five has had his conviction quashed because the trial judge’s misdirection of the jury was a “miscarriage of justice”, the state’s highest court has ruled.

Stabbing victim Tylor Bell

A Queensland man serving life in jail for the stabbing murder of a father of five has had his conviction quashed because the trial judge’s misdirection of the jury was a “miscarriage of justice”, the state’s highest court has ruled.

Alex Robert Smart won his appeal against conviction in the Court of Appeal, with reasons published on Friday, two months after they made orders setting aside the verdict of the jury handed down in May last year.

Smart was convicted of murdering Tylor “TJ” Bell after a fight at a Gympie supermarket spilt on to the Bruce Highway on Father’s Day, 2019.

In a unanimous decision handed down by Justices Jean Dalton, Peter Flanagan and David Boddice, they ordered Smart face a new trial because trial judge Peter Applegarth had misdirected the jury in his summing up of the case in the final stages of the trial.

Smart was deprived of a fair chance of acquittal because there is a risk the jury “impermissibly used” Smart’s purported lies to undercover police to find him guilty of murder, they found.

Alex Robert Smart. Pictures: Facebook

Justice Boddice noted that Justice Applegarth’s summing up “did not direct the jury as to the relevance of each” of four purported lies Smart was alleged to have told undercover police offices in the watch-house cell after his arrest as to how the lies may relate to Smart’s alleged intention to kill Bell.

Justice Boddice said that the trial judge had dealt with the four purported lies in a “collective manner” and not individually, as was necessary to avoid.

He said in his reasons that “the collective manner in which the trial judge dealt with the lies the intrusion of” a false lie with the collective of other lies infected the entire direction given to the jury that a lie is evidence of guilt.

He noted that the prosecutor at trial had also been imprecise in addressing the jury about the effect of four purported lies told by Smart, which the jury were told “were lies which evidenced a consciousness of guilt”.

Justice Peter Applegarth

“There is a real risk the jury impermissibly used the purported lies in determining that they were satisfied beyond reasonable doubt of the appellant’s guilt of the offence of murder,” the unanimous reasons stated.

One of the purported lies related to who had produced the murder weapon.

The judges concluded that there was a live issue at trial as to who had produced the knife, with Smart claiming Bell pulled out a knife, perhaps a “flick-style” knife, but he managed to get it off Bell, but eyewitnesses only saw Smart with a knife.

“If the jury accepted (Smart) had the knife, not the deceased, it would be open to the jury to conclude it was a deliberate lie to assert the deceased had attacked (Smart) with a knife; and that (Smart) had disarmed the deceased, made in the knowledge that the true state of affairs would implicate him in the charged offence,” the appeal reasons states.

Originally published as Stabbing murder accused Alex Robert Smart to face retrial due to judge’s misdirection of the jury