PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Unbeknown to him, Weaven had been snared in an elaborate police sting known as "Mr Big". "Gary Butcher" was an undercover cop recording their conversations and his gang an elaborate ruse, created with the sole purpose of winning Weaven's trust and eliciting his confession. He had been groomed into a criminal organisation that didn't exist. For two months, Weaven's every interaction with the gang had been planned out in 17 "scenarios", each designed with specific goals in mind, from building rapport to suggesting the group held sway with corrupt police and government officials. The scenarios often involved "props" to make them feel real, from large bundles of cash and diamonds, to machine guns and vehicles. Even Weaven's first chance encounter with the gang had been set up in advance, when an undercover police officer visited his home to ask him to take part in a survey at a local bar, where the agent would later introduce a member of the gang as her boyfriend. After a three-week trial that centred on his confession and a knife identified by police as the murder weapon, Weaven was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 20 years behind bars."
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "In Weaven's case, the confession used to secure his conviction was just one of three wildly differing versions of events he had offered to undercover police. "Gary" rejected his two first accounts, one of which implicated Cook's daughter. In the other, Weaven described carrying out the killing with another man, Sean, who had been later shot, minced up and fed to dogs, a claim dismissed as "fantasyland" by the undercover interrogator. "We believe there are very significant issues with this confession because of the way that it was obtained and because the many differences between the confession and the facts of the prosecution case should have made it clear that the confession was unreliable," Ruyters said. "We believe these differences support the idea that Glenn was just trying to give the police what they wanted and making it up as he went." Kirk Luther, an assistant psychology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, said suspects targeted in such operations could easily be manipulated into confessing something they hadn't done."
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POST: "Did a 'Canadian Technique' police sting, and a bogus Mr. Big leave an Australian Murder trial fatally flawed?" by Reporter John Power, published by MSN News on Sept. 1, 2021.This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.
GIST: At a luxury Melbourne hotel in September 2009, crime boss Gary Butcher made Glen Weaven an offer that promised to make his problems go away.
Weaven had been helping Butcher ply his criminal trade for several months in Australia'ssecond-largest city, following a chance meeting in a bar with a stranger who happened to be a member of the crime lord's gang.
Weaven's involvement started small and initially stayed within the confines of the law. At Berwick Springs Hotel in Melbourne's southeastern suburbs in July, he accepted an offer of A$200 (US$150) to surreptitiously take notes during a meeting between his new acquaintance and another man.
Before long, Weaven graduated to taking part in the gang's most serious criminal endeavours, in which tens of thousands of dollars could change hands, from collecting protection money from sex workers and blackmailing a cheating spouse, to smuggling guns and counterfeit cigarettes.
At the Crown Towers Melbourne hotel in September, Butcher was ready to give Weaven his chance to become a full-fledged member of the gang. Membership promised spectacular rewards. From the gang's next big job alone, Weaven could expect a cut of A$100,000, Butcher said.
"It is a sensational lifestyle," the crime boss said, describing a life of excess where "if you ding a car, you don't fix the friggin' thing, you just go and buy another one".
"This is your future mate if you want it," he told Weaven.
But first Weaven would have to prove his loyalty. To win Butcher's trust, he would have to come clean about the murder of his partner, Mary Lou Cook, a 37-year-old mother of three who was stabbed to death in her home on December 14, 2008. Butcher said he knew police considered Weaven a key suspect and had been supplied with the evidence they had gathered against him, which was "substantial". The crime boss couldn't afford to have the police "sniffing around any of the people that are working for me".
Weaven would have to tell him exactly how he carried out the crime so the gang could get rid of any "loose ends", including evidence such as the murder weapon, that could jeopardise their operation.
"I need it to be fixed so it never comes back, OK?" Butcher said.
After offering two different versions of events that Butcher found unbelievable, Weaven admitted stabbing Cook in the neck and stomach, before setting her house on fire, following an argument over her failure to pay for drugs obtained from another man.
He told Butcher he had disposed of a knife and a screwdriver in an area off a suburban road in Berwick, about 6km from the scene of the crime.
"There was no reason at all for it," Weaven said. "It's just something that shouldn't have happened."
Unbeknown to him, Weaven had been snared in an elaborate police sting known as "Mr Big".
"Gary Butcher" was an undercover cop recording their conversations and his gang an elaborate ruse, created with the sole purpose of winning Weaven's trust and eliciting his confession. He had been groomed into a criminal organisation that didn't exist.
For two months, Weaven's every interaction with the gang had been planned out in 17 "scenarios", each designed with specific goals in mind, from building rapport to suggesting the group held sway with corrupt police and government officials. The scenarios often involved "props" to make them feel real, from large bundles of cash and diamonds, to machine guns and vehicles.
Even Weaven's first chance encounter with the gang had been set up in advance, when an undercover police officer visited his home to ask him to take part in a survey at a local bar, where the agent would later introduce a member of the gang as her boyfriend.
After a three-week trial that centred on his confession and a knife identified by police as the murder weapon, Weaven was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 20 years behind bars.
MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE?
Nearly a decade later, the case is under renewed scrutiny as researchers at Melbourne's RMIT University, in partnership with the Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative, an NGO that investigates potential wrongful convictions, make the case that the courts found an innocent man guilty.
"Glen's conviction has all the hallmarks of a miscarriage of justice," said the initiative's director Michele Ruyters.
Under RMIT's partnership with the initiative, its students can intern with the initiative.
Added Ruyters: "There was no evidence of motive, no forensic evidence linking Glen to either the fire or the murder, no evidence linking Glen to the knife the police found, no medical evidence establishing this knife as the murder weapon, credible alibi evidence was ignored and there was no investigation of other more likely suspects."
Victoria Police declined to comment on the case.
"This matter has been finalised at court and Victoria Police has no further comment," a spokesman said. "For operational reasons we do not comment on police methodology."
Ron Iddles, the retired detective who led the investigation, said he was unable to discuss the case due to contractual obligations with an Australian broadcaster.
Efforts to reach the Cook family for comment were unsuccessful.
The "Mr Big" police tactic used to obtain Weaven's confession lies at the heart of questions about his guilt.
The "Canadian technique", as it is also known as, was developed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) during the 1990s as a way to solve murder cold cases. As of 2008, the tactic had been used at least 350 times in Canada, according to the RCMP, with a 95 per cent conviction rate in resulting prosecutions.
But the technique also has a dubious history of being linked to false confessions. In Canada, the tactic has been called into question in numerous criminal appeals, lawsuits against police and at least half a dozen wrongful convictions, including that of Clayton George Mentuck, who in 2000 was acquitted of murdering a 14-year-old girl after an appeal judge found he had falsely confessed due to "overwhelming" inducements by the police.
In 2014, the Canadian Supreme Court significantly tightened the rules around the procedure's use after finding that suspects had often confessed in the face of "powerful inducements and sometimes veiled threats". Without banning the tactic outright, the court ruled that evidence gathered through such means should be considered "presumptively inadmissible".
"Mr Big" stings are legally prohibited in the United States and Britain, but remain in use in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In 2007, the Australian High Court ruled that confessions obtained through the procedure were admissible as evidence.
In Weaven's case, the confession used to secure his conviction was just one of three wildly differing versions of events he had offered to undercover police. "Gary" rejected his two first accounts, one of which implicated Cook's daughter. In the other, Weaven described carrying out the killing with another man, Sean, who had been later shot, minced up and fed to dogs, a claim dismissed as "fantasyland" by the undercover interrogator.
"We believe there are very significant issues with this confession because of the way that it was obtained and because the many differences between the confession and the facts of the prosecution case should have made it clear that the confession was unreliable," Ruyters said. "We believe these differences support the idea that Glenn was just trying to give the police what they wanted and making it up as he went."
Kirk Luther, an assistant psychology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, said suspects targeted in such operations could easily be manipulated into confessing something they hadn't done.
Weaven would have been especially vulnerable after losing his job and relationships while dealing with the intense stress of being a suspect in a murder investigation, said Luther, who has researched the "Mr Big" operations in Canada.
"Then all of a sudden you start paying him very large sums of money for doing very menial jobs, and you essentially tell him we're going to keep wining and dining you, and give you lots of money, you'll have some really close friends - and we're going to take that all away from you unless you tell 'Gary', or Mr Big, that you... committed this crime," he said.
"So what's the downside for Glen here for telling 'Gary' about this? He gets to keep his job, the investigation in his mind goes away, he gets his close friends."
Luther said that while juries had trouble understanding how anyone could confess to something they hadn't done, research showed that people did so for numerous reasons including fear and expectations of peer approval and other rewards.
The Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative examination of the case points to other discrepancies that it argues raises serious doubts about the conviction.
Although Weaven described a precise location where he said he disposed of the knife, the alleged murder weapon recovered by authorities was found in a different area several kilometres away (during the trial, police said Weaven had later directed them to a different spot, although there is no video or audio confirmation of this).
Weaven also told undercover police he had buried the knife 12-18 inches underground. However, police testified that Weaven led them to an area at night where, the following morning, they found a knife that was only partially buried, with the handle visibly sticking out of the ground. The knife described by Weaven had a broken blade, whereas police recovered an intact blade with a broken handle. No forensic evidence linking Weaven or Cook to the knife was ever presented.
Weaven has claimed that police had the opportunity to plant the knife as the area was not monitored or secured from the time he was taken there to when the weapon was recovered the next day.
"We're currently investigating alternative explanations for a knife being found in that location," Ruyters said.
Questions have also been raised about whether the knife identified by authorities is consistent with the injuries inflicted by the murder weapon.
Byron Collins, a private forensic pathologist hired by the Weaven family, wrote in a report for the case that a stab wound to the victim's lung would have "considerably greater dimension if the alleged weapon had been used to inflict this injury".
During the trial, Michael Burke, a forensic pathologist appearing for the prosecution, said the discrepancy between the size of the blade and the wound did not exclude the knife as the murder weapon, although he acknowledged there was a "reasonable argument, as has been put forward, that, based on the measurements, there is some doubt".
Lorenzo Gitto, an expert in knife wounds at Upstate Medical University in New York, told This Week in Asia he would not be confident identifying the knife as the murder weapon as it was "virtually impossible to link a knife to a wound unless the knife's tip has embedded itself in the body and broken off".
"I would just say that it can be consistent with, and that I can't exclude that," Gitto said. "Too many variables need to be considered, and the comparison should be only hypothesised."
In 2018, the Supreme Court of Victoria dismissed an application by Weaven to appeal his conviction that cited the legal changes in Canada that significantly restricted the use of "Mr Big" and a psychologist's report that suggested police had exploited his "vulnerabilities".
In his ruling, Justice Phillip Priest wrote that the Canadian Supreme Court's decision did not "represent the law in Australia".
"In any event, the potential for the evidence of the confession to Gary to have been excluded on the basis of psychological pressure exerted upon the applicant, or exploitation of his vulnerabilities, was capable of being - and was - ventilated at trial," Priest said.
After exhausting the traditional avenues for appeal, Weaven's hopes for clearing his name rest on being able to convince a judge of the existence of "fresh and compelling evidence" that justifies another hearing of his case, say RMIT researchers.
"We believe that Glen Weaven's conviction for murder should be urgently reviewed," Ruyters said. "We also call for a review into the use of Mr Big scenarios in Victoria."
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.
The entire story can be read at:
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