Well, I have no knowledge of exactly what happened there. Again, I think mistakes are made in courts; that's why we have appeal provisions. I don't know if that's an appealable issue or not. Judges are human. But certainly, in my view and my experience....
Section 161 is designed to ensure that courts address these particular issues. Courts are very good at addressing them in general, certainly, and it would be very rare that they would make a mistake. In my view that would be considered to be somewhat inconsistent with how we would expect it to function in the courts.
That being said, again, in a rare instance it may happen that the court just neglects to impose a condition and not state on the record why they didn't do it. Would it make sense to require them to state on the record? I have to agree with the previous witness. I don't know that it would add a lot, and I think it may have a detrimental impact in the sense that when we start piling on requirements for a court to do this, this, this, and this, it can become confusing, and they spend more time checking the code and making sure they're within the scope of what they're required to do as opposed to exercising their discretion properly.
I'm not saying it's a horrible thing to do. We haven't really given it a lot of thought. When we were given the draft bill to review, we looked at what the bill does and where perhaps it needed some improvements for consistency and clarity. That wasn't one of the issues that we took a close look at.
All I can suggest is that I agree it wouldn't have a huge impact. Would the mistake possibly be made anyway, even if you had that amendment? And what would be the effect of the mistake, at the end of the day, if you had that amendment? What would the court do afterwards? I think it would be an administrative error, and there wouldn't be an appeal, although I suppose the victim could possibly try to press for an appeal of the condition.
I'm not sure what the effect would be.