BOOK REVIEW: Drew Rooke’s A Witness of Fact - Colin Manock - (Scribe): Reviewed by Harold Levy; Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
Once in a while, a work is published that has an enormous impact on a criminal case - or even on a nation's entire criminal justice system.
The trial of Steven Truscott by Isabel LeBordais was a powerful exposition of the wrongful conviction of Steven Truscott, and a leading example of such a work in Canada. In the words of author Julian Sher, "the book remains a classic” because, "it put the trial back on the front pages and - eventually - in front of the highest court in the land."
J'accuse, an open letter by Emil Zola to the President of the French Republic, published on the front page of a Paris newspaper, has also become a classic for the stellar role it played in the exoneration of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jew wrongfully accused of being a traitor to his country.
I suspect that the recent publication of A Witness of Fact - the peculiar case of chief forensic pathologist Colin Manock by Author Drew Rooke, will also become a “classic”, for several reasons - apart from the fact that it is a fascinating read, beautifully written, and a source of intriguing new information.
After initially reading the book, in practically one sitting, I could not believe that such a horrible, mean, unqualified, incompetent, deceitful, bigoted narcissistic man as Colin Manock had been permitted to serve in such an important role for decades by a government which is still trying to avoid the controversy like the plague - a controversy it surely needs to face.
First, the book will help to achieve justice for wrongfully convicted people like Derek Bromley, an Aboriginal man, largely convicted because of the insidious role played by the notorious pathologist.
Second, the book is exposing the role played by the South Australian government in making Manock the state's chief pathologist (a position he was utterly unqualified for) - for failing to rectify the “wreckage” he left behind when he retired in 1995 leaving an untold number of botched inquests and miscarriages of justice - and for the government’s failure to bring him to account.
Before the publication of A Witness of Fact the South Australian government had denied, delayed and obfuscated the issues which had been previously raised about Manock's disastrous performance and the untold harm it had caused.
Over the previous 20 years, there had been numerous legal attempts at review and extensive investigative reporting which had led to growing public concern about the “Manock mystique”.
However, as I wrote in a recent post, that changed with the publication of Rooke's book: "Thanks to this book, and the efforts of advocates such as impassioned law reformer and criminal justice advocate Dr. Robert Moles to draw attention to it, no amount of 'spin', political rhetoric, or 'looking the other way' can hide the South Australian governments' abdication of the public trust vis-à-vis Manock. For so many years, up to the present, it has covered up Manock's lack of qualifications and training, his incompetence, rejection of supervision and his refusal to accept criticism. There has been so much obfuscation, years of sloppy, error-prone work, and so much more in the face of the clear and certain knowledge of their existence."
Drew Rooke could not have picked a better time to publish Witness of fact. Just now the case of Derek Bromley is becoming a major news story throughout Australia in addition to gathering international attention as a case that just won't go away.
He was convicted in 1984 for a murder based largely on the evidence of the now discredited Dr Manock. Bromley has served over 38 years in prison, some 14 years past the expiry of his non-parole period. He refuses to express remorse for a crime he says he did not commit and so cannot be allowed to proceed with a parole application. His co-accused did succumb to the pressure to admit defeat and was released from prison many years ago.
Whilst Bromley is not allowed to visit his family for any attempt at social reunion, he is a senior officer on the prison fire appliance and is regularly called out to tackle serious bush and building fires and to attend serious road accidents. He is also qualified to deal with ‘hazardous materials’ incidents and on many occasions he is clearly putting his life at risk to help others.
As Drew points out in his book, on Bromley’s recent appeal, his senior counsel withdrew all materials from the court file on the last afternoon of the appeal which indicated that Dr Manock was not qualified and had been subjected to serious criticism from Coroners, judges and internationally qualified experts. This was despite Mr Bromley’s written request to his lawyers to make Manock’s lack of qualifications a central issue on the appeal. Whilst the appeal judges expressly approved this conduct, Bromley has never received any explanation as to why this was done. There can be no doubt that this conduct made it much easier for the judges to refuse Mr Bromley leave to appeal.
This inexplicable conduct has now been followed by a very public campaign by his supporters to press the South Australian Attorney-General to exercise his power to ensure that the prosecution makes full disclosure “to the court” of any matters affecting the credibility of the Crown’s case as they are legally obliged to do. This includes the fact, as Drew points out, that the state itself declared in legal proceedings involving Dr Manock, that he was not in fact qualified to do autopsies or to give expert evidence in court. It has never been explained why he was then allowed to continue doing autopsies and give appear in court cases over the next 20 years – he helped to secure over 400 convictions and complete 10,000 autopsies!
Bromley’s case is now headed for the Australian High Court (equivalent to the Canadian Supreme Court). The Attorney-General has declared he does not have the power to direct the chief prosecutor to comply with his duty of disclosure – clearly ignoring the statutory provision which expressly provides him with that power. And the chief prosecutor has told Bromley’s lawyers that he does not intend to inform the High Court judges of what the whole world knows now – thanks to Drew’s book – that the chief crown witness was not qualified and in fact gave false and perjured evidence.
Although Rooke acknowledges that much about Manock remains a mystery, he manages to take us deep into Manock's dark soul through a police officer named Peter Whellum. In the late 1970's he was summoned to an outback settlement called 'Mintabie' to investigate the suspected murder of an Aboriginal man.
Whellum was shocked to learn that Manock, who had been flown in for the death investigation, had decided to conduct the autopsy in the main street "without any shelter, shade or running water, and in full public view”, instead of flying the body to Adelaide as would have been the standard practice.
Whellum made it clear to Manock that he had arranged a private location for him to perform the autopsy - but Manock wasn't interested. He dismissed the proposal, and told Whellum that he would perform the procedure there and then, under the huge outback sky without any shelter, shade, or running water, and in full public view.
"He asked me to get a couple of 200-litre drums and a sheet of corrugated iron," Whellum recalls. "The drums were placed five, six-feet-apart, and the corrugated iron placed on top of the two drums. The body was lifted onto that and the post-mortem proceeded".
"Once Manock began the post-mortem, a crowd of about thirty locals quickly gathered to watch the gruesome spectacle as the body was stripped of its clothing. This fuelled Whellum's unease at the situation. With the help of his patrol partner, he immediately moved them back, but says it proved 'impossible' to keep them any further away than about 30 to 40 metres. The atmosphere varied from 'curiosity to mirth,' On several occasions, a few in the crowd retched at the sight of Manock - who, Whellum remembers, was wearing a heavy-duty plastic apron, surgical gloves, and a wide-brimmed hat - dissecting the wounded corpse, removing and examining the organs.”
Once all of the organs had been removed, they were thrown into a stainless-steel bucket by the side of the body. Then, Whellum says, Manock picked up a metal ladle and dipped it into the blood and bodily fluids that were pooled within the open body, He held the ladle at arm's length and, facing the crowd, joked loudly: "Anyone for soup?"
At this, Whellum says, some people in the crowd laughed. He also remembers one of the detectives who had arrived on the airplane with Manock earlier that day and was standing nearby saying casually, “Oh, typical Colin”. But Whellum felt “sickened and disgusted” by what he was witnessing. The whole situation was, he says, “surreal”, an “affront to one's sensitivities; and proof that some-times there's no dignity even in death”. It seemed to Whellum that neither Manock nor anyone in the crowd cared for the man who was lying dead. There was an attitude of, "He's just another blackfella. Who cares? Which I find quite deplorable."
Although, as an experienced police officer Whellum had been exposed to many horrible experiences, as Rooke tells us, but nothing he had otherwise experienced compared to the horrors of that day. It left Whellum with the sense that Manock was something of a 'show-pony' with 'fucked up ethics, if they existed at all', and who 'got a kick out of desecrating a corpse' especially of an aboriginal man.
Reading Whellum's account of this horrifying incident, I too was disgusted by the utter lack of dignity, humanity and professionalism manifested by Manock at Mintabie. I cannot understand why he wasn't kicked out of medicine and the forensic services then and there. How can he have been permitted to remain in the highest position in South Australia's s forensic service, without any accountability for almost two more decades.
Early in A Witness of Fact, Rooke makes the important point that the Manock scandal was about much more than the questionable conduct and mistakes of just one forensic pathologist. It was about an entire legal and political system, which manifestly failed "to properly address or even acknowledge its flaws and to ensure that the interests of justice, science and truth were upheld and protected."
To this end, Rooke talks about the important role played by fierce battlers against injustice. Dr. Robert Moles, and his wife, Flinder's University Professor Bibi Sangha have worked for many years to bring Manock to account - to exonerate innocent people like Derek Bromley, Henry Keogh, Frits Van Beelen, David Szach and others - and to prevent future such debacles by conducting a public inquiry.
"I'd found major institutional flaws in the legal system," Moles told Rooke. "And the question then was could I walk away from it and pretend I didn't know about it? And the answer was, absolutely not. I had to attend to it and do something about it."
"More than two decades after he first started campaigning on the subject, Moles is still calling for a public inquiry into Manock's career and cases, as well as what he calls the 'skulduggery' and consistent failure of successive state governments, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the wider legal establishment to intervene, despite knowing for decades of his shocking record and of potential miscarriages of justice. In fact, he says such an inquiry is now more urgent than ever, given how long the scandal has gone on for."
Rooke also highlights the role played by Robyn Milera, who, although initially sceptical, is utterly convinced of Derek Bromley's innocence. She has become a close friend, and has been working to draw attention to the role Manock has played in his wrongful conviction for years.
"I think he really got off on being a part of the prosecution, she says," according to Rooke. "I think that's how he saw himself - as part of the prosecution process. I don't think he had the best interests of his profession or the integrity of science at heart. He must have had the biggest story in his mind of himself."
"Why did I care?" asks Robyn Milera rhetorically. "Is it just my personality? I really don't know. But it is definitely a big investment. It makes me sad. The human condition makes me sad. In the sense that we're so okay with somebody else being thrown under the bus."
Why should we all care?
After reading Drew Rooke's well-researched opus, we ask, how can we not?
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"A Witness of Fact: the peculiar case of chief forensic pathologist Colin Manock”, published by Scribe Publications:
https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/a-witness-of-fact-9781922310057
Networked Knowledge: Colin Manock home page - including correspondence with the Attorney-General and Premier of South Australia:
http://netk.net.au/ManockHome.asp
Networked Knowledge: Derek Bromley home page.
http://netk.net.au/BromleyHome.asp
Robyn Milera: 'Bringing Justice’: "The Journey of Derek Bromley."
https://bringingjustice2020.wordpress.com/about-the-team/
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. 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: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
