Court document · Criminal Law
Sentencing submissions and guidance letter for character referees
Outline of written submissions on sentence under the Crimes (Sentencing Procedure) Act 1999 (NSW), with a letter to character referees explaining what to write and the court's rule that references must not be generated by AI.
- Kind
- Court document. A document filed or served in a court or tribunal.
- Where it applies
- New South Wales
- AI use
- Red Keep AI out of the decisive steps. A lawyer does the work.
- Law stated as at
- 17 October 2026
- Status
- Maintained. Checked against the cited sources on 17 October 2026.
- Version
- 1
- Source
- Written for this library
When to use it
Use after a plea or finding of guilt in a NSW court, when preparing the defence case on sentence. The referee letter goes to each referee before they write. Not for Commonwealth offences without adding the Crimes Act 1914 (Cth) Pt IB framework.
How AI may be used
Lawyer-led. AI may index the mitigation material and table disputed facts against the facts sheet; it writes no part of a character reference and no part of anything a referee signs. Any AI help with the submissions triggers the para 16 verification duty.
AI may
- Index the character references, reports and certificates the lawyer has collected, and list mitigating factors with no document behind them yet.
- Table the client's disputed facts against the police facts sheet, with paragraph references, inside a firm-approved tool.
- Build a comparables table from judgments the lawyer has selected and read.
AI must not
- Must not write, rewrite, polish or summarise a character reference, and must not suggest wording to referees.
- Must not enter psychological reports, the client's instructions or admissions into a consumer AI tool.
- Must not supply sentencing authorities or statistics that the lawyer has not verified.
The lawyer checks
- Each reference carries the Gen AI disclosure and the lawyer has spoken to the referee to confirm they wrote it and know of the offence.
- Every citation and reference to evidence is verified as existing, accurate and relevant, and not by AI alone (SC Gen 23 paras 16–17).
- Facts in mitigation are proved by admissible evidence on the balance of probabilities.
Method: how the Green, Yellow and Red levels are decided. This is guidance for planning, not legal advice.
Official form
Open the official form. Always use the current version from the issuer.
Read the full text
The full text is for signed-in accounts. It is free. When you sign in you can:
- read the whole precedent, with its drafting notes beside it;
- copy it, or download it as a Word file or Markdown;
- add it to your firm’s knowledge base, so colleagues can find it;
- let the AI tools you connect read it from that knowledge base.
The summary, the law it rests on and the AI-use guidance above stay public. Privacy.
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