Jamie McKinnell

So we saw him go into this pretty small video link room of Silverwater Jail.

He was wearing a green prison top.

And he sat there pretty quietly to watch all of this unfold.

We only heard him speak a couple of times, and it was usually when he was asked to confirm that he could hear things or that he understood things through this whole process.

And the other people we saw, obviously, were the parties.

So we had his defence team, his barrister, and then a team from the Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions.

Well, they started by really sort of emphasising this point about the likely delay in the proceedings that this case will be subjected to.

And they were setting out from the very start to show that there are exceptional circumstances in this case that justify a release on bail because of those delays in combination with other factors that they raised.

But

There was a lot of talk at the start about the likely delay in this case.

They were calling it unprecedented and uncharted legal territory.

And they said there'll be delays here because of things like the size and complexity of this case.

Also, the need to classify some of the prosecution's material as containing sensitive information, which then...

has flow-on effects and it has this whole set of rules about access and who can access it and where they can be and the storage of that information.

So that's another complication.

They raise delays in the sense of whether or not other soldiers might be charged with offences arising from the same incidents that have become part of this case.

So Ben Robert Smith's barrister, Slade Howell, was saying that it's likely this case will take years and it will have many twists and turns along the way.

But what I found perhaps the most interesting, Stockie, was this one point that Mr Howe raised.

He said it's very likely in due course that a superior court or courts might need to consider whether the extraordinary pretrial publicity surrounding these allegations means that a fair trial of the allegations is simply not possible.

So that was one line in there that stuck out to me just about how unpredictable this case might be as it goes through the court system today.