The accused is required to file and serve a Defence Response to the Crown opening.
What the defence response does is go through each of the paragraphs of the Crown Opening and reply to them.
If a fact is admitted by the accused (like living in the same house as the alleged victim during a period of time) then that fact would be admitted in the defence response.
The aim of the Crown Opening and Defence Response to the Crown Opening are to try to limit the issues that are in dispute and for everyone to be aware of what may be raised.
In the Defence Response, the defence might raise any other topics about evidentiary issues (ie. the witness of first complaint evidence is being challenged, that there is an argument about confidential communications).
A Defence Response is a very important document as substantial movement from what it contains can have significant effects on how the trial is run.
It is very important that the Barrister or Solicitor who is actually running the trial prepares this document. They will be aware of how they plan to run the actual trial and the impact of all the evidence to be called, or proposed to be called.
This is part of the reason for this process. The aim is to make people grapple with the hard issues about how a case is going to be run.
