STORY: "We trust that the justice system gets it right but history shows otherwise," by Susan Horsburgh, published by 'Women's Weekly' on July 27, 2015;
SUB-HEADING: "Tasmanian grandmother Sue Neill-Fraser has spent six years in prison for a crime some legal experts believe she didn’t commit. Susan Horsburgh investigates the case described as the biggest miscarriage of justice since Lindy Chamberlain."
GIST: After a three-week trial that polarised Tasmania back in 2010, Neill-Fraser
was found guilty of murdering her partner, despite the absence of a
body, a weapon, a direct eyewitness or any forensic evidence connecting
her to the crime. In
an entirely circumstantial case, a court ruled that she attacked Bob
Chappell on board the couple’s 17m yacht, Four Winds, on Hobart’s River
Derwent on Australia Day, 2009. The
judge said Neill-Fraser had struck him, “quite likely” with a wrench,
single-handedly winched his body onto the deck and manoeuvred it into
the dinghy, before dumping it in deep water, weighed down by the boat’s
missing fire extinguisher. Her case wasn’t helped by her conflicting
accounts of where she was the night of Bob’s disappearance, nor by a
former friend who claimed she had asked him to kill Bob more than a
decade earlier (both of which Neill-Fraser says she can explain). In
the years since her imprisonment, a passionate and growing group of
supporters has doggedly protested her innocence, holding rallies,
raising a $40,000 reward and whipping up CDs and bumper stickers. Backed
by some of Australia’s top legal minds, including Lindy Chamberlain’s
defence lawyer, their grassroots campaign to quash her conviction has
recently gained extra momentum with the drafting of new right-to-appeal
legislation in Tasmania. Modelled
on legislation that was passed in South Australia in 2013 and which
could be adopted in other states, the draft Tasmanian law would give
prisoners who have exhausted all avenues of appeal the right to return
to court if fresh and compelling evidence arises. In Neill-Fraser’s
case, serious doubts about the forensic evidence that secured her
conviction could constitute fresh evidence. According
to legal academic Dr Bob Moles, an international expert on wrongful
convictions, there are probably half a dozen cases in each state that
deserve to be reheard. He calls Neill-Fraser’s case “the worst of the
worst”. “It’s
a shocking miscarriage of justice because the errors are so
self-evident – you don’t have to be a top QC to work that out,” he says.
“It’s right up there with Lindy Chamberlain.” Dr Moles points to the
prosecutor’s wrench theory, which was constructed without any direct
evidence. “At least in the Lindy Chamberlain case they thought they’d
found blood – something to go on.” He
says at least 1 per cent of convictions are wrongful, but some
academics think it’s closer to 4 per cent. That means that, in an
Australian prison population of 30,000, at least 300 people could be in
jail for crimes they didn’t commit.........Most
of us trust that the justice system gets it right – and assume we’ll
never have to test it anyway – but history has repeatedly shown
otherwise, most spectacularly in the case of Lindy Chamberlain. Dr Moles
says even scientists can subconsciously “tweak their evidence” to
secure a guilty verdict when they are caught up in the emotion of
high-profile cases and swayed by damning media reports. “A
baby killed in the outback, a man tossing his beautiful model
girlfriend off a cliff – a lot of these cases involve shocking
circumstances,” says Dr Moles, co-author of Forensic Investigations and
Miscarriages of Justice. “Police see themselves as assuaging public
alarm … They have to nudge the evidence one way or the other and they
don’t understand the terrible wrong they’re doing.” Melbourne
filmmaker Eve Ash says she spent four years making her 2013
documentary, Shadow of Doubt, to give Neill-Fraser a voice. “Tasmania is
sort of off the grid and she’s a grandmother, someone no one cares
about,” says Eve. “She’s invisible – and people said, ‘She lied to
police, therefore she’s a killer’.” Since
the documentary’s release, high-profile criminal barristers Robert
Richter QC and Chester Porter QC have called for an independent inquiry,
and Lindy Chamberlain’s defence lawyer, Stuart Tipple, has drawn
troubling parallels between the two cases.........The
Tasmanian right-to-appeal legislation is expected to pass by the end of
September, and Barbara (Etter, a police officer for 30 years) intends to seek leave to appeal soon afterwards.
In readiness, she has collected a raft of new expert opinions,
including a report from the Victorian Police Forensic Services
Department (VPFSD), analysing the DNA sample of a homeless girl found on
Four Winds. After the 16-year-old girl claimed she had never been on
the boat, the prosecutor dismissed the find as a “red herring” and told
the jury the DNA could have been transferred on a police officer’s shoe.
The VPFSD report, however, concludes that it was a “relatively large
amount of DNA” that was more likely to have been directly deposited:
“[T]here is no evidence to support the hypothesis that the DNA detected
in sample 20 was the result of a secondary transfer event caused through
foot traffic”. It
seems the girl actually was on the yacht, and lied about it. That
alone, Barbara argues, should introduce an unacceptable level of doubt."
The entire story can be found at:
http://www.aww.com.au/latest-news/crime/tasmanian-grandmother-sue-neill-fraser-jailed-for-murder-but-did-she-do-it-21558
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.
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:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.
