Bulletin: Henry Keogh: (Aftermath 6); Blogger Andrew Urban puts it brilliantly in his latest "Pursued Democracy" post: "Keogh murder trial abandoned – as was justice."..."South Australian DPP Adam Kimber has abandoned his attempt to re-try Henry Keogh for the 1994 murder of Keogh’s late girlfriend Anna-Jane Cheney, claiming his reason that a key witness is too ill. At first he didn’t name the witness; later the witness was named as Dr Colin Manock, the disgraced former head of forensic pathology in SA. A little later still, Dr Manock is reported to have told a friend by phone that he was ‘fit as a fiddle".

"South Australian DPP Adam Kimber has abandoned his attempt to re-try Henry Keogh for the 1994 murder of Keogh’s late girlfriend Anna-Jane Cheney, claiming his reason that a key witness is too ill. At first he didn’t name the witness; later the witness was named as Dr Colin Manock, the disgraced former head of forensic pathology in SA. A little later still, Dr Manock is reported to have told a friend by phone that he was ‘fit as a fiddle’. Kimber said in a statement, issued in the afternoon of Friday 13, November: “I concluded that essential matters would not be able to be proved unless the witness was called. I came to the view that there was no reasonable prospect of conviction without the witness.” As Civil Liberties Australia reports, “Manock headed the forensic science service in SA for about 30 years from 1968 until his retirement in late 1995, originally with no formal forensic pathology qualification, later with a questionable certificate provided by a professional association basically because he was the head man. “Over those three decades, forensic science expanded worldwide like no other branch of police or legal work. “Manock is believed to have handled more than 10,000 cases: about 400 involved alleged murders, including dozens where convictions were secured. In many other cases, Manock’s findings may have allowed guilty people to go free, including in three cases of possible “battered baby” syndrome. “Criticisms of Manock by his peers and lawyers over the years have included words like “unqualified”, “unreliable”, “dogmatic”, and “incompetent”. The High Court has used words like “discredited”, “speculative” and “unsupported by cogent evidence” in relation to him and his findings. A Royal Commission found his approach to an Indigenous death in custody to be “inappropriate” and his explanation “inadequate”. Manock has recanted key evidence he gave in some trials, including in that of Keogh. “These facts make it hard to fathom why SA DPP Kimber would ever have perceived Manock as a “key witness” in a proposed re-trial of Keogh.”......... Perhaps it is Adam Kimber who should be investigated, along with the whole sorry South Australian justice system, as Civil Liberties Australia suggests. Civil Liberties Australia says “the Crown in SA knew the likelihood that there was no murder – that the death was possibly, even probably an accident – as early as 2004. At least, if the justice system in SA had been functioning properly, the state’s Solicitors-General and Attorneys-General since 2004 should have known: an expert forensic report they themselves commissioned told them so. The report described a forensic test they could run to prove death was not deliberate by a handgrip, as described by Manock. The Crown failed to undertake that test. “The Crown also failed to give a copy of the report to Keogh, as legal rules required them to do. He languished in jail for a further 10 years, innocent, desperately trying to get his case back before an appeals court.”
http://pursuedemocracy.com/2015/11/keogh-murder-trial-abandoned-as-was-justice/