COUNTDOWN: 15 days to Wrongful Conviction Day: (Thursday October 6, 2016);
"In 1979, 19-year-old David Szach was sentenced to life for the murder of
his lover, 44-year old criminal lawyer Derrance Stevenson. Fourteen
years later, Szach was unexpectedly released from prison. While Szach
has always maintained his innocence and set about trying to clear his
name after his release, he has been repeatedly denied his legal right to
an appeal. Szach is afflicted with motor neurone disease, a progressive disease
that attacks the motor neurones in the brain and spinal cord. Before
this disease ultimately claims his life, Szach wants his 1979 murder
conviction officially quashed. Szach is now challenging his conviction under recently introduced South
Australian legislation that permits criminals to launch a second appeal
if there is compelling new evidence. He will be represented at his
appeal by Tony Kerin, a managing partner of Maurice Blackburn South
Australia. While the case has always been dogged by circumstantial evidence and
allegations of bias from law enforcement and the judicial system, the
appeal will rest on the forensic evidence presented at the trial by Dr.
Colin Manock. By modern standards, Dr. Manock’s forensic pathology was
incorrect. After Stevenson’s home freezer was forcibly opened and his corpse
discovered, Dr. Manock inserted a thermometer into the victim’s liver,
conducted a series of equations, and deduced a time of death. His
evidence placed Szach at the scene of the crime when the murder
supposedly took place. Aside from the alleged flawed forensic evidence used to convict Szach,
witnesses said more than one man visited Stevenson’s home on the night
of the murder. There’s also the compelling story of an unidentified man
who showed up on the steps of the South Australian Legal Aid Commission
the morning after the murder. Kerin will focus on Dr. Manock’s time of death estimate, which was used to convict Szach."
http://www.australasianlawyer.com.au/news/maurice-blackburn-launches-david-szachs-bodyinafreezer-appeal-223715.aspx
See Dr. Bob Moles intrduction to the Szach case on the phenomenal NetK Blog at the link below. The timing of death is important in any
murder case because it helps to narrow down the range of people who could be
regarded as suspects. In the Van Beelen case the estimated timing was so tight
that, even though it has been called ‘scientifically unsound’, it eliminated
all but Van Beelen from suspicion. But Van Beelen is not the only case in which
serious questions have been raised concerning the evidence given with regard to
the timing of a death. One such case is that of David Szach who was convicted
of the murder of the Adelaide lawyer Derrance Stevenson. Stevenson’s body was found with a gunshot wound to
the head, in a freezer at his own home..........
Szach charged with murder: David Szach, 19, was in a relationship with the 44-year-old Derrance Stevenson. According to the
autopsy report, Stevenson is said to have died at some time between 4
and 5 June 1979. It appears that Szach had driven from Adelaide to Coober Pedy (about 850 kilometres north of
Adelaide) on the night it was thought that Stevenson had died. Szach had originally bought a bus ticket for the journey.
However, he cashed the ticket in shortly before he left Adelaide, and travelled overnight to
Coober Pedy in Stevenson’s rather ‘flash’ car. Police regarded this as
suspicious at the time as Stevenson was said to have been possessive about his car. Szach was questioned by the police in
Coober Pedy, and later there was some confusion about the precise timing and
content of these interviews. The defence argued at the trial that the police
deliberately didn’t tell Szach before the interviews that he was regarded as a
suspect in the murder in the hope that he might inadvertently reveal something
of value to them. It is a breach of police procedures to interview a suspect
without properly informing them of their real purpose. It would, for example,
be unfair to Szach if he thought that he was being interviewed on a charge of
car stealing, while the police were actually trying to obtain information
against him on a charge of murder. The police said that the interviews had
taken place before they had received phone calls from the police in Adelaide telling them of the murder.
Szach was charged with murder and tried in the Supreme Court in Adelaide,
in November and December 1979.
Timing of death. Stevenson’s body was found in his freezer.
The pathologist, Dr Manock, calculated the time of death by utilising a formula
which had been developed from experiments where bodies had been frozen in the
prone position (that is, lying flat). When Stevenson’s body was found, however,
it was bent round in the foetal position with his back uppermost and his arms
and feet downwards. Dr Manock said that he used the formula to
calculate the time the body took to cool, adjusting the formula by 40 per cent
because Stevenson’s body was doubled over rather than prone. In those
circumstances, he said, there would be a reduced surface area of the body
exposed and it would therefore take longer to cool down. The difficulty arises
in how much the formula is to be modified. A modification of about 40 per cent
can hardly be classified as an ‘adjustment’. In his autopsy report, Dr Manock stated:
A body will cool 85 % of the temperature
differential within 28 hours. However, where the effective surface area is
reduced, the time is lengthened and in the above circumstances it is my opinion
that the lengthening of cooling time would be about 40%. Dr Manock did not provide any proper scientific basis for such an adjustment. This is an example of a
fact being accepted into evidence on the basis of an assertion without any
properly established evidence or studies to support it. The ultimate effect of this evidence was to
make Szach a plausible suspect because he was in the vicinity at the calculated
time of death. It also meant that another ‘person of interest’ to the
police had an alibi.
Pathology evidence reviewed. Some years after the trial, Dr Byron Collins, a consultant forensic pathologist, reviewed the pathology evidence. In
his report he said: Dr Manock’s formula was initially proposed
by Fiddes and Patten with their work being published in the
Journal of
Forensic Medicine, 1958. On the review of the paper, it becomes
transparently obvious that it was not applicable to the circumstances of
Derrance Stevenson’s death.........A basic principle of scientific work is
that the procedures are capable of being replicated. This means that they can
be spelled out in such a way that another scientist could go through the same
procedure and arrive at the same answer. In his report,
Dr Collins outlined the reasons for his view that it was not
appropriate for Dr Manock to use the formula to
calculate time of death in this case. He pointed out that the authors of the
research report, which was based on experiments on bodies frozen on the prone
position, stressed that their findings were not to be used or applied in
circumstances which varied significantly from those of the experiments. Dr Collins noted in his report that
fundamental to the reliability of any formula is the accuracy of its individual
factors. He went on to say that none of the variable factors that Dr Manock
used in his calculations were matters that could be properly substantiated. For example, Dr Manock substituted a liver
temperature for a rectal temperature. He did not explain why he thought that
one could just be substituted for the other. The running temperature of the freezer was
unknown at the time the body was placed in it. In normal mode it would have
been –20 degrees C, but in superchill mode it would have been –28 degrees C,
a significant difference. The core body temperature at the time of
death was assumed by Dr Manock to be 37 degrees C, but he provided no appropriate
evidence to support this assumption. In normal circumstances, bodies begin to
cool down after death and Dr Manock had no way of determining the time between
the shooting and when the body was placed in the freezer. Without knowing the
room temperature and the length of time between death and refrigeration, Dr
Manock would have had little idea of the body temperature at the time it was
placed in the freezer.
Szach convicted. Szach was convicted of murder and sentenced
to life imprisonment. He appealed, and this was heard in
March and April 1980, but was unsuccessful. In 1991, Michael David QC
inquired into the matter on behalf of the Legal Services Commission to
determine if it should fund a further appeal. He advised against it. Throughout his time in prison Szach refused
to apply for parole because he claimed that he was in jail because of the
shortcomings of the legal system. He claimed throughout that he did not commit
the crime and that he would not apply for parole as that would amount to an
admission of guilt. Eventually the law in South Australia was changed to enable the Chair of the
Parole Board to apply for a non-parole period on behalf of a prisoner. Szach was released in 1993.
http://netk.net.au/Szach/SzachIntro.asp