"Mr O'Donnell says that Robert Barnes, the technician witness who gave the crucial expert evidence on gunshot residues and who, between the inquest and the trial, became convinced that the assassin had used a silencer, had been criticised by the Victorian Court of Appeal and had his evidence rejected as unsafe - because his opinions were found to be contradicted by direct evidence.
Before Mr Barnes gave evidence against Eastman, he had had his employment at the Victoria Police state forensic laboratory terminated for failing to ''operate within the required parameters and quality control system''. It is not clear whether police or prosecutors here knew, but neither the jury nor the judge were told of this, though it may raise questions about the credibility of his evidence."
REPORTER JACK WATERFORD; THE CANBERRA TIMES;
----------------------------------------------------------
"The rifle, which belonged to a retired schoolteacher and former friend of Eastman, could explain something Eastman has never been able to explain: why the boot of his car contained microscopic specks of gunshot residue, including residue from the same type of ammunition thought to have been used to kill Mr Winchester outside his Deakin home," the story continues.
"The schoolteacher has sworn an affidavit saying that he had borrowed the car from Eastman to go rabbit shooting during the late 1980s. Eastman had not known that the teacher was going shooting, and that, in doing so, he had put the gun in the car boot.
Eastman was convicted from a strong chain of circumstantial evidence, much of which turned in a controversial, but at the time uncontested, set of linkages and deductions made from forensic findings about gunshot residue.
An application by Eastman for a review of the case comes before the ACT Supreme Court next week. Eastman has only recently been told about the gun.
During Eastman's 1995 trial, the prosecution made much of the fact that Eastman could not explain how there was gunshot residue in the car. The point was emphasised during Eastman's appeal.
But the witness, unaware of the significance of the car boot, had already come forward with his story. He had told then ACT public defender Terry O'Donnell, who had appeared intermittently for Eastman at stages of the case, and between the jury verdict and sentencing.
The witness gave Mr O'Donnell a note of the firearm and ammunition he had carried in the car.
But in the chaos and turmoil of the Eastman trial and appeals, during which Eastman repeatedly sacked lawyers and, often was unrepresented and refusing to cross-examine witnesses, details of the witness were forgotten.
They emerged when Mr O'Donnell, who is preparing a book on the controversial case, was reviewing his notes of the trial, and, seeing a record of his discussion with the witness, contacted him again.
The rifle, a rifle bag, and ammunition bought at the time, including ammunition of the type police say was used to shoot Winchester, has been sitting in a Canberra solicitor's safe for more than a year.
Mr Winchester was shot twice outside his house on the night of January 10, 1989 by someone who appears to have lain in wait for him to return home from a visit to his brother in Queanbeyan.
There was immediate speculation that he was killed in retaliation for his role in deceiving members of the Calabrian Mafia, or 'Ndrangheta, over the development of a cannabis crop at Bungendore. Mr Winchester had supervised a police intelligence operation in which he had allowed those involved to believe he had been bribed.
The trial of people involved in that crop had been only a month away at the time of his death.
But although there was a solid body of evidence pointing in towards a 'Ndrangheta hit, and although an AFP unit involved in collecting intelligence on organised crime strongly believed this was the most likely theory, the formal police investigation became focused on Eastman, said to have a grudge against Mr Winchester for his refusal to intervene in an assault case for which Eastman had been charged.
Documents associated with the 'Ndrangheta theory have circulated in legal circles for years, but open discussion of them has been long circumscribed by an array of court suppression orders, based on claims that open discussion could identify, and endanger, police informants.
Mr O'Donnell believes that Eastman was wrongly convicted, and that the solution to the case lies both in reopening investigations into the involvement of organised crime, and in a complete review of the prosecution case against Eastman, who has already served 16 years for a murder he has always denied.
Eastman has been in virtually continuous litigation about his conviction, but has never succeeded in having an open-ended inquiry, and increasingly, has become bogged down in narrow inquiries into very specific questions. Judges have defined the limits of inquiries, and not allowed counsel to stray. On several occasions the DPP has sought to get superior courts to further limit the purview of inquiries. Judges have regarded themselves as bound by previous rulings, by other judges, about contested evidence. This is in spite of the fact that other judges, including on the High Court, have expressed concern about the conduct of the case.
Mr O'Donnell says that Robert Barnes, the technician witness who gave the crucial expert evidence on gunshot residues and who, between the inquest and the trial, became convinced that the assassin had used a silencer, had been criticised by the Victorian Court of Appeal and had his evidence rejected as unsafe - because his opinions were found to be contradicted by direct evidence.
Before Mr Barnes gave evidence against Eastman, he had had his employment at the Victoria Police state forensic laboratory terminated for failing to ''operate within the required parameters and quality control system''. It is not clear whether police or prosecutors here knew, but neither the jury nor the judge were told of this, though it may raise questions about the credibility of his evidence.
At Eastman's trial, a witness whose direct evidence contradicted crucial prosecution expert evidence about the use of a silencer was not called, although he had given evidence at the inquest. The witness, a 26-year army veteran with extensive weapons training including in the use of silencers, was adamant that he had heard rifle shots. He was certain that the shots were not silenced.
His evidence, if accepted, would have undermined the opinion evidence of Mr Barnes.
At Eastman's jury trial, the prosecution ignored the opinion of every lawyer who had appeared in the trial up to March 22, 1995, that Eastman was unfit to plead. On that day, a letter was sent to the director of public prosecutions asking that action be taken on the fitness to plead issue. The prosecution itself had psychiatric reports concluding that Eastman was ''insane''. But it did nothing. Defence lawyers could not raise the issue in court, because Eastman refused to allow them to do so, and because the NSW Bar Council had advised them they could not go against their instructions.
A part of the police investigation strategy, after taking advice from a psychiatrist, involved subjecting Eastman to harassive surveillance in the hope that he would ''crack'' and do or say something tending to point towards his guilt. While this did not happen, the continuous needling of him played a role in Eastman's erratic and self-destructive courtroom behaviour. Senior police were reported as saying they were ''driving Eastman nuts''.
On June 29, 1995, at a time when Eastman was unrepresented and was refusing to participate in the trial, the judge, justice Ken Carruthers, referred to Eastman's behaviour in court and mentioned a Victorian Supreme Court decision and a law journal article by a prominent psychiatrist discussing ''the disruptive defendant''. Both squarely suggested that where there was such a defendant, the question of fitness to plead arose. But the trial judge, who had not seen the letters from defence counsel, or the psychiatric reports, did not raise the question.
Indeed while the judge appeared to believe that Eastman's disruptions were designed to abort the trial, rather than reflecting a mental condition, he himself commented that ''I do not know if the accused has any insight into his behaviour''. In a limited inquiry years later, former chief justice Jeffery Miles decided that the question of fitness to plead had arisen during the trial, but decided, in effect, that this had not affected a just outcome.
When the question of Eastman's fitness to plead was raised for the first time in the High Court in 2000, the court was not shown the transcript of June 29. Nor was justice Miles in his review. As a result, reviewing judges have always proceeded on the basis that the issue had not occurred to the trial judge, or those with a duty to advise him during the case.
The AFP intervened during Eastman's trial to maintain suppression orders on documents tendered during the inquest about the suspected involvement of Italian organised crime in the murder.
These include reviews of information from informants and surveillance, evidence of inquiries being made about Mr Winchester; some suggest advance knowledge that a murder is about to occur. There was also significant intelligence from Italian police investigating organised crime pointing to 'Ndrangheta involvement. Some information pointed to hired killers, or ''shepherds'' coming from Calabria; in fact there is more compelling evidence suggested the murderer may be a Western Australian who flew in from Italy.
Since the trial, it has been suggested that the information pointing to Calabrian involvement was not relevant to the murder. In reality, Mr O'Donnell says, the information was not sufficiently investigated and should not have been so lightly dismissed.
As recently as 2009, anti-Mafia investigators based in Rome have attributed the murders of Donald Mackay in 1997, Mr Winchester in 1989 and Geoffrey Bowen in 1994 to the Mafia in Australia. These murdered men have been referred to as ''cadaveri eccellenti''- illustrious corpses - and these murders are said to follow a pattern well known in Italy. All in all, more than 25 murders and disappearances in Australia linked to the 'Ndrangheta but have not been solved, whether by the AFP, state forces, or national crime commissions."
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/eastmans-missing-clue/2347910.aspx
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;
