Six Counts, Five Guns

Police searched a building unit that the Accused used as a music studio. In a cluttered storage room they found five firearms: three long guns inside an orange canvas bag, and two handguns with ammunition inside shoeboxes in a plastic tub. A tactical vest was also recovered. Items bearing the Accused's name - a passport, licences, a prescription bottle - were in the unit, though the evidence never established exactly where in the unit they had been found. He faced a series of possession offences and six separate counts of careless storage of a firearm. He argued that the Crown had never circumstantially proved his knowledge of guns hidden in bags and boxes in a cluttered room used by others. He also raised a narrower point about how the storage counts had been drafted against the number of guns actually seized.