Commentary: "Lundy's guilt: Beyond reasonable doubt?" by reporter Dan Satherly, published by 3 News on April 9, 2015.
GIST: "A journalist who has extensively studied the Mark Lundy case won't say the re-imprisoned killer is innocent, but is questioning whether the jury was capable of making the right call. Mike White's 2009 North & South article on the murders of wife Christine and daughter Amber in 2000 led to international lawyers and experts joining Lundy's defence team, eventually paving the way to having his original convictions quashed by the Privy Council in 2013. But last week, his retrial ended the same way as the first. Mr White was there, and was also the last journalist to speak to Lundy before he was sent back to prison. In a new article for North & South, he raises a number of questions and lines of evidence the trial left dangling. "As a mere matter of logic, if you're going to plan to kill your wife, what's the one thing that might point to you having a loveless relationship and not really caring about your wife? That would be hiring a prostitute just before you did it," he said on TV3's Paul Henry programme this morning. "That doesn't make any sense to me, if this was a planned murder as the police and Crown say.".........Much of the evidence presented in the retrial was of a highly scientific nature – particularly in regards to biological tissue found on Lundy's shirt, who it belonged to and whether it was even human. Mr White suggests the jury might not have been able to understand it all, considering so much of it was contradictory. "This wasn't a task that they asked to do. It's an awful responsibility for them. But you have to say that during the trial they were exposed to some extraordinarily complex scientific evidence that everyone in court struggled to understand – even the judge, who's an enormous brain.""
GIST: "A journalist who has extensively studied the Mark Lundy case won't say the re-imprisoned killer is innocent, but is questioning whether the jury was capable of making the right call. Mike White's 2009 North & South article on the murders of wife Christine and daughter Amber in 2000 led to international lawyers and experts joining Lundy's defence team, eventually paving the way to having his original convictions quashed by the Privy Council in 2013. But last week, his retrial ended the same way as the first. Mr White was there, and was also the last journalist to speak to Lundy before he was sent back to prison. In a new article for North & South, he raises a number of questions and lines of evidence the trial left dangling. "As a mere matter of logic, if you're going to plan to kill your wife, what's the one thing that might point to you having a loveless relationship and not really caring about your wife? That would be hiring a prostitute just before you did it," he said on TV3's Paul Henry programme this morning. "That doesn't make any sense to me, if this was a planned murder as the police and Crown say.".........Much of the evidence presented in the retrial was of a highly scientific nature – particularly in regards to biological tissue found on Lundy's shirt, who it belonged to and whether it was even human. Mr White suggests the jury might not have been able to understand it all, considering so much of it was contradictory. "This wasn't a task that they asked to do. It's an awful responsibility for them. But you have to say that during the trial they were exposed to some extraordinarily complex scientific evidence that everyone in court struggled to understand – even the judge, who's an enormous brain.""
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
