Dear Crown Law Office,

I would like to request some statistics and information from you under the Official Information Act. As I understand there are a number of criminal charges where consent needs to be obtained from the Attorney-General to prosecute, and that in effect most decisions on these things are really made by the Solicitor-General rather than the Attorney-General under s9A of the Constitution Act, so I figured the best place to come for some statistics about these charges would be Crown Law. This is especially true given that the Attorney-General doesn't fall under the scope of the OIA.

1) I was hoping that you could provide me with some statistics of how often consent to lay charges has been given for "consent to prosecute" crimes, along with a tally of how often consent has been refused, broken down by the particular criminal charge.

As for the term for which I wish to request statistics for, I am unsure of the amount of data or the ease of access to statistics that there would be. If it is only a small amount of charges, or statistics are relatively easy to access, then may I ask for as far back as practical, as it would be interesting to see if there are any emerging trends. If statistics are hard to access and there is a large amount of data, then may I ask for the information for 2011?

2) I am guessing that consent being denied to prosecute would be rather rare, so may I also please request any correspondence, emails, reports, or other information that would help explain the reason why consent was declined for the last three cases in which this occurred?

3) If any policies or processes are followed to determine whether consent to prosecute should be given, can I please request a copy of any documents that illuminate how this process works?

Although not required by the Act, I understand it is often helpful to explain the purpose for a request. I am a law student, and the concept of these type of charges and how they work interests me, so I am really just doing this for my own interest

Feel free to contact me if you wish me to clarify my request.

Yours faithfully,

Joshua Grainger