In sittings today in Melbourne and Sydney, the High Court held its final special leave hearings for 2015, allowing appeals from the following four cases to proceed to the national apex court:

• Betts v R [2015] NSWCCA 39, a sentencing appeal concerning an horrific instance of domestic violence, where Betts stabbed his former partner repeatedly over a lengthy period when she arrived at their flat to remove her belongings, intending that both would die together. The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal rejected Betts’s arguments that his offence was not aggravated by the extent of his partner’s injuries and was mitigated by his own extensive deliberate self-injuries (including injuries caused by his partner with his consent), but accepted his arguments that the trial judge wrongly aggravated his sentence because of his partner’s vulnerability and wrongly failed to mitigate his head sentence due to prison being especially onerous for him given his permanent self-injuries. However, the Court nevertheless let his sixteen-year sentence stand given the seriousness of his offending.

• Cosmopolitan Hotel (Vic) v Crown Melbourne Limited [2014] VSCA 353, concerning a refusal by Crown to renew two leases at its Southbank Entertainment precinct, despite the tenant having been required to extensively renovate the premises in order to obtain an earlier renewal of the lease. The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal had found that a statement by Crown employees that it would ‘look after’ the tenants at the next renewal if the renovations were high quality was enforceable as a collateral contract. Victoria’s Court of Appeal held that a Supreme Court judge rightly overturned this finding on the basis that the the statement was not intended to be a promise and was too vague to enforce, but nevertheless remitted the case to the Tribunal to determine what remedy (short of renewing the lease or compensating the tenants for all the profits they might have made) Crown should give the tenants for breaking its promise to look after them.

• Deal v Kodakkathanath [2015] VSCA 191, an appeal against the failure of a compensation claim by a primary school teacher for injuries to her knee that she sustained when she fell off a small step-ladder while removing unwieldy paper artworks from a wall. The majority held that, although the trial judge’s rejection of her claim that the school breached an occupational health and safety regulation concerning ‘hazardous manual handling tasks’ was premature, inadequately explained and involved some misreadings of the statute, it was nevertheless correct because that regulation did not cover injuries caused by falls.

• R v Nguyen [2013] NSWCCA 195, an appeal concerning what were described as ‘unusual, even unique, factual circumstances’ presenting ‘a challenging sentencing exercise’ – the fatal shooting of one plain clothes police officer by another in response to a shot fired by Nguyen in excessive self-defence. The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal held that the trial judge was wrong to find that Nguyen’s offending was mitigated by his mistaken belief that the cops (who were executing a search warrant) were robbers, as that fact was already implicit in Nguyen’s conviction for manslaughter (rather than murder), and also that the trial judge was wrong to give Nguyen wholly concurrent sentences for the shot he personally fired (which wounded the police officer’s arm) and the shot the other police office fired (which killed the police officer), as each involved distinct consequences and criminality. Describing his offence as ‘a most serious example of the crime of manslaughter’ and noting the need to deter crimes against the police, the appeal court raised Nguyen’s total sentence from nine years and six months to sixteen years and two months.