PUBLISHER'S NOTE: An array of links to 'Networked Knowledge' (a superb source of materials relating to wrongful convictions in Australia and throughout the world) can be found through out this post - and accessed at:
http://netk.net.au/Folbigg/Folbigg92.pdf
Harold Levy: Publisher The Charles Smith Blog.
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Jane Hansen: The Folbigg case became a homicide investigation after the 4th child died, even though the man who conducted the autopsy, Dr Alan Cala, found evidence of myocarditis or inflammation of the heart. Bob Moles: Well, the fact that he said, that when you have four babies, who have died one after the other, the only sensible explanation for their deaths can be some involvement by some person who has caused those deaths. There can’t be a ‘natural causes’ explanation for four consecutive deaths in the same family. And that clearly has proved to be wrong. And he said he didn’t know of any other cases where there had been such multiple deaths that had not been homicides. And subsequently Professor Cordner produced examples that had occurred prior to Ms Folbigg’s trial, where such things had occurred and had been shown to be natural causes deaths rather than the involvement of a third party. Jane Hansen: So, you think there was shades of Professor Roy Meadows in there? Bob Moles: I think very much that there was. Jane Hansen: Meadows now thoroughly debunked theory led to several wrongful convictions of others like Sally Clark and Angela Cannings in the United Kingdom around the same time as the Folbigg case."
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INTRODUCTORY COMMENT: "The 'Mother’s Guilt' podcast examines one of Australia’s most extraordinary criminal cases – that of a mother accused and convicted of smothering her four infant children in the 1990s.
What if the Kathleen Folbigg case is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Australian criminal history?
Folbigg has been described as Australia’s worst female serial killer and Australia’s most hated woman, after being found guilty of three counts of murder and one of manslaughter in 2003. She was sentenced to 40 years in jail. The four infants aged from 19 days to 18 months died between 1989 and 1999.
The Crown argued Ms Folbigg smothered each of her children because they were ‘an irritant’ and got in the way of her going to the gym, socialising and sleeping.
But what if the courts got it wrong two decades ago?
Scientists now believe two of the children likely died of an inherited genetic mutation that causes sudden cardiac death, throwing the entire original case against Folbigg into a reasonable doubt.
The Mother’s Guilt podcast traces the case from the 1960s, starting with Kathleen’s tragic start to life, through her childhood and teens and into her marriage to Craig and their four separate losses.
We hear from lifelong friends who know a very different Kathleen to the one presented in court. We interrogate the Folbigg diary entries that were used to paint a picture of a woman guilty of killing her children.
We learn from globally-renowned scientists who have called on the NSW Governor to pardon Kathleen Folbigg, which has led to a new judicial inquiry into the evidence which starts in November 2022. Over eight episodes, the Mother’s Guilt podcast examines the new
science, tests the original case with experts in the field and examines the diary entries in depth.
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Episode 1: Reasonable Doubt: Branded as Australia’s worst serial killer, Kathleen Folbigg has spent the past two decades in jail after being found guilty on three counts of murder and one of manslaughter.
But did the justice system get it wrong? Four infants died unexpectedly and the finger of blame was pointed at one woman, but there was no forensic evidence of smothering.
Transcript Dr Bob Moles contribution from 2:30:
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Jane Hansen: Now 151 scientists have backed Kathleen Folbigg’s innocence with the science of genetics and asked for her pardon.
I spoke to a legal expert who knows all about wrongful convictions. Dr Robert Moles is an academic who studies miscarriages of justice and he says the new evidence and the people behind it does move the case beyond reasonable doubt to probable cause and he says it’s even enough to quash her conviction.
Bob Moles: Does that create a reasonable doubt? Well of course it does and blind Freddy could see that couldn’t they? There has never been a case as strong as this in any other jurisdiction. I’ve never heard a case as strong as this.
Jane Hansen: So, you have no doubt that her conviction will be quashed?
Bob Moles: Well, absolutely, no doubt at all. I am as confident of that as I can possibly be. And I think that every single day that this decision is delayed is a disgrace, and some of the scientists, some of the most eminent scientists, have said that themselves.
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Episode 2 The Sisterhood: Born into violence and tragedy, with a father who killed her own mother, Kathleen became a ward of the state, but when she was fostered into the Marlborough family, she forged close friendships at school in Newcastle and a remarkable sisterhood was formed. They became friends for life. Karren Hall vividly recalls the time Kathleen’s fourth child Laura simply stopped breathing while in her care only a few months before the infant died.
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Episode 3: Science vs The Law: There were holes in the trial from the start. Laura, the fourth child to die had an obvious cause of death, but it was overlooked in favour of the now debunked Meadow’s Law of “one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder”.
The theory of Professor Roy Meadow led to a handful of women being wrongly convicted of killing their children who died of SIDS. This is how science caught up with the unanswered questions in the case.
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Episode 4; Another Lindy Chamberlain: Legal expert Dr Robert Moles digests the latest evidence and talks through the legal implications of the Folbigg case which he argues cannot stand under the current legal framework.
“Bigger than the Lindy Chamberlain case’ in terms of injustice,” he says. Chamberlain was wrongly convicted of the murder of her daughter Azaria, who had in fact died as a result of being attacked and taken by a dingo.
Dr Robert Moles, a legal academic and researcher from Flinders University and the Network Knowledge project that uncovers miscarriages of justice, said the two cases had distinct similarities, but the Folbigg case was “unprecedented”.
Intro: The children died over a ten-year period and the suggestion was that they all passed away due to SIDS.
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Bob Moles: Once this scientific evidence has been presented, it is quite sufficient to warrant this conviction being set aside. And by that, I mean not just the conviction for Laura, but all four convictions.
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Jane Hansen: Welcome back to Mother’s Guilt the podcast looking into the case of Kathleen Folbigg.
A mother found guilty of smothering her four infant children over two decades ago.
Sentenced to 25 years she has spent the last 19 years in jail. As we have heard in previous episodes, there is a growing chorus of legal and scientific experts calling for Kathleen Folbigg’s pardon.
This all began after new genetic evidence emerged pointing to the fact that two of the four children Laura and Sarah likely died of cardiac arrythmias associated with a mutation inherited from their mother.
In the coming weeks scientists will give further evidence into the science associated with Kathleen Folbigg’s convictions.
But in this bonus episode I speak with legal academic Dr Robert Moles who specialises in examining miscarriages of justice. You see, Kathleen’s case is not unique.
Bob Moles: In the last 20 years I’ve run Networked Knowledge and we investigate, as an innocence project, serious allegations of miscarriages of justice.
We focus particularly on those which have occurred in South Australia and around Australia, but we also do comparative studies of other miscarriages of justice in other jurisdictions such as the UK, Canada and the USA.
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Jane Hansen: Well even before the latest scientific evidence with regard to the Folbigg daughters carrying a supposed gene mutation that could cause sudden death, did you find any fault with the original trial in 2003?
Bob Moles: Yes, from the first time I began to study the Folbigg case, I was very concerned about the fact that she had been convicted on the basis of the evidence which was presented at her trial.
My main reason for that was because one of the expert witnesses, Dr Alan Cala, had said that he’d never really come across any other case in which there had been multiple child deaths which were not established to be homicides.
[Link to Dr Cala Homepage on NetK]
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Jane Hansen: We know from previous episodes that there was a legal fad back in the 90s and early 2000s, based on Sir Roy Meadow’s theories that one sudden infant death is tragic, two is suspicious and three is homicide.
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News report: The Crown said the accused smothered each of her children to death. She either deliberately killed them or wanted to render them unconscious to in effect put them to sleep.
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Jane Hansen: The Folbigg case became a homicide investigation after the 4th child died, even though the man who conducted the autopsy, Dr Alan Cala, found evidence of myocarditis or inflammation of the heart.
Bob Moles: Well, the fact that he said, that when you have four babies, who have died one after the other, the only sensible explanation for their deaths can be some involvement by some person who has caused those deaths.
There can’t be a ‘natural causes’ explanation for four consecutive deaths in the same family.
And that clearly has proved to be wrong.
And he said he didn’t know of any other cases where there had been such multiple deaths that had not been homicides.
And subsequently Professor Cordner produced examples that had occurred prior to Ms Folbigg’s trial, where such things had occurred and had been shown to be natural causes deaths rather than the involvement of a third party.
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Jane Hansen: So, you think there was shades of Professor Roy Meadows in there?
Bob Moles: I think very much that there was.
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Jane Hansen: Meadows now thoroughly debunked theory led to several wrongful convictions of others like Sally Clark and Angela Cannings in the United Kingdom around the same time as the Folbigg case.
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News commentator: Sally Clark the woman who lost both her kids to SIDS or sudden infant death syndrome, but at the time they weren’t sure of this so she was actually convicted of murdering them as two kids from the same family dying of SIDS is extremely unlikely.
What happened was they calculated the chance of this happening, two kids in the same family, dying from SIDS and they found it to be about 1 in 73 million so it seemed like something criminal may have been going on and she was eventually convicted of murder and spent a few years in jail when in fact she was not guilty.
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Bob Moles: Professor Meadows was saying, when you have multiple child deaths in the same family, then you basically have to ‘think dirty’ you basically have to think there could well be outside involvement in the deaths of the children.
So, when it came to the deaths in the case of Sally Clark for example, he was saying that the chances of a baby dying of SIDS sudden infant death syndrome was 1 in 83,000 or something of that sort.
So, if you have two deaths in the same family, you multiply 83,000 by 83,000 to get the odds, and then he said that would be the equivalent of winning the Grand National, two three or four times in succession to get those sorts of odds.
And to the common mind, that would suggest that this is so improbable, that she must have been involved in the babies’ deaths.
And the accountants around the country, were up in arms and they said this shows a very basic misunderstanding of mathematics and statistics.
But you see how it played into the common understanding that where you have deaths, and you have suspicion, then its much easier to attribute some fault to the caring parent that to engage in a proper study of a scientific cause of death.
Jane Hansen: Yeah, well I’m no mathematical genius, but I do know that your chance of winning the lottery is exactly the same as your chance of winning the lottery the second time, or vice versa.
Bob Moles: Of course, of course, exactly. And so, in many of these cases what happens is that the scientific evidence that is produced at trial, turns out to be what we would call ‘junk science’.
And it’s motivated by a kind of tunnel vision. It’s also motivated by the idea that when you have a particularly horrific circumstance which has occurred – the deaths of young babies and things like that – people are naturally alarmed and disturbed at what has happened.
And sometimes, the best way to cure that sense of alarm in the community, is by folk pointing the finger of suspicion at somebody. And then if you have an arrest, the idea of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ sometimes goes out the window and everybody can then feel
‘ah yes,we’ve got this under control and we know what’s happening now’. The due process - the proper procedures of law are not properly implemented. And that clearly has occurred in the Folbigg case.
Jane Hansen: So, in this case, it came down to nobody’s ever heard of four deaths in one family from sudden infant death syndrome?
Bob Moles: That’s right. So, that make it very suspicious, doesn’t it? And look, rightly so. And clearly where you have a number of deaths in the same family, its entirely appropriate to examine the cause of those deaths.
Jane Hansen: Was there any evidence of smothering as was the Crown’s case?
Bob Moles: In the Folbigg case, there has never been any scientific evidence of interference in the death of the babies by a third party. None at all. Normally, if you have a smothering death, you’d expect to find some bruises or injury to the inner lip or around the face or what they call ‘petechial haemorrhages’ in the eyes which shows that the baby has been asphyxiated. But we have very clear scientific evidence that says there is no evidence at all of interference in the babies’ deaths by a third party.
Jane Hansen: Which brings us to Laura Folbigg and her myocarditis. She was the fourth child that died. She was 18-19 months old, and she – her death was determined as ‘undetermined’
Bob Moles: That’s right and initially, Dr Cala had said we have four unexplained baby deaths.
Professor Cordner who was then the head of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine said that that’s not correct. In one of these cases, Laura’s case, we can identify a cause of death, related to inflammation of the heart, ‘myocarditis’, and he would have put that down as a cause of death. So, we have a direct conflict between the evidence of two experts.
In evaluating that evidence, one would have to say that in fact Professor Cordner is an expert in paediatric deaths. He was engaged by the Goudge Inquiry in Toronto, which was a major judicial inquiry into the work of a forensic pathologist who specialised in paediatric deaths. [Link to Goudge Inquiry Homepage on NetK]
And if you look at the work of that inquiry you will see that Professor Cordner conducted seminars, furnished reports, extensive studies and explained how baby deaths should be investigated and dealt with. So, we have a very good history of a very competent highly
efficient work in this area. And he said he could identify a cause of death, in respect of Laura, related to a heart defect.
The interesting thing from our point of view is that once you have an explanation consistent with the innocence of the accused, in a circumstantial case, you cannot then leave it to the jury to find a conviction. Once you have an innocent explanation in a circumstantial case consistent with the innocence of the accused, you cannot convict. And when Professor Cordner came forward with that explanation, in respect of Laura, that was a bar to the continued conviction of the four babies. So that would warrant all four convictions being overturned.
Jane Hansen: What’s interesting about what he did as well, he sent the slides of her heart out to ten other pathologists and he didn’t tell them the details and asked for their opinion of what the subject may have died of. All ten came back and said myocarditis.
Bob Moles: That is exactly what I would expect from Professor Cordner. He is highly proficient, engages in the proper procedures, and subjected his findings to extensive peer review by other qualified experts in this field. And the fact that they did ‘blind testing’ as we would call it, and came back with results that supported his findings, would be sufficient in any circumstances, to demonstrate the fact that his findings were in fact correct.
Jane Hansen: But hang on here, he presented this, Professor Cordner presented this to the first inquiry in 2019. In fact, lawyers who were acting for Kathleen Folbigg, thought right, that’s it, we’ve got it she should go free now.
Bob Moles: That’s correct. I think in fact he presented his findings at the first appeal of Ms Folbigg. But at any event, the law is quite clear, that once this scientific evidence has been presented as part of judicial proceedings, it is quite sufficient to warrant the conviction being set aside. And by that, I mean not necessarily the conviction of Laura, but all four convictions. Because all four convictions were obtained at a single trial, and if there was a defect in the findings in relation to one of the children, that clearly casts doubt on the process of the trial, and warrants all four convictions being set aside.
You can then have a retrial of course, in relation to that or any other case, but once Professor Cordner came forward with those findings, that should have been the end of it, it is quite clear.
Jane Hansen: Now the scientific breakthrough that shows a probable genetic cause for both Laura and Sarah’s deaths, has forced a new inquiry to hear from the scientists.
News broadcast: There’s been a dramatic twist in the case of convicted child killer Kathleen Folbigg with dozens of experts calling for her release from prison.
Jane Hansen: I asked Dr Moles about the new evidence. And that brings us to the science, these mutations that the scientists have discovered, what’s your understanding of that?
Bob Moles: My understanding is that we have very eminent experts who have engaged in the investigation of a possible genetic defect and that at one stage we had 27 of the world’s leading scientists who had studied the genetic components involved in these cases and were willing to identify a clear genetic defect in respect of two of the deaths. Those findings were then subjected to further peer review and my understanding is that the current situation is that there are 150 of the world’s leading experts who are all agreed that there is a genetic cause of death in at least two of the cases - and its highly probable that there is also a similar and slightly different genetic defect in respect of the other two.
You have to bear in mind that in a murder trial, or a manslaughter trial, the requirement that we all understand is that the conviction can only be obtained if the evidence supports that conviction ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’. All you have to do to overcome the conviction is to establish that there is in fact a ‘reasonable doubt’. I have always maintained that once Professor Cordner provided his report, supported by Dr Hilton, that was sufficient to create a reasonable doubt.
I don’t know of any other case in America or Britain or Australia, where you have had 150 of the world’s leading experts all agreed - there is no dissenting opinion - nobody else has come forward to say they’ve got it wrong. 150 of the world’s leading experts are all agreed that they’ve all identified a cause of death and for the conviction to remain standing as long as it has, I mean that’s really quite disgraceful in my view.
Jane Hansen: Its actually 151 as of now.
Bob Moles: Oh I see, good.
Jane Hansen: That’s pretty powerful ammunition?
Bob Moles: Well, it’s absolutely unprecedented, there’s no doubt about that at all. If you study the issues of wrongful convictions, in Canada, in Britain and Australia, as we have done, you will find that there are many, many cases where just a single expert has come forward on the appeal and said the evidence given at trial was wrong. And the courts in the UK have said, well this is an eminent expert, they know what they’re talking about. And in
some cases, they’ve said, we’ve read the written report, so we don’t need to call the expert to cross-examine the expert. It’s perfectly clear what this expert is saying, and that is quite sufficient to create the reasonable doubt and to have the conviction overturned. Just a single expert which has often been found to be sufficient to do that. So, ten, twenty, 50, 150? Well goodness gracious me, if that’s not sufficient to satisfy the test of ‘reasonable doubt’, I don’t know what is. It’s entirely unprecedented. There has never been a case like this before, in any other similar jurisdiction.
Jane Hansen: So, you’re confident on that basis that her conviction will be quashed?
Bob Moles: Well, if you were to apply the laws governing criminal appeals in a fair and objective manner, as soon as those reports were handed in, the matter should have been referred directly back to the Court of Criminal Appeal, which could have sat within 24 hours and set the conviction aside. She should have gone home straight away.
News report: The children died over a ten-year period and the suggestion was that they all passed away due to SIDS, but a jury several years ago found her guilty of their deaths. But in the last few months, we saw an inquiry launched to double-check if this was the case. What it found late last night was that it reinforced her guilt and that there was no reasonable doubt surrounding her responsibility for their deaths.
Jane Hansen: In the 2019 inquiry, the science was rejected in favour of the diaries which the inquiry found reinforced her guilt. We’ll examine those diaries in the next episode. But Dr Moles believes the circumstantial evidence in the diaries runs counter to the science.
Bob Moles: That is an example of the illogicality that’s come into the consideration of these cases in the criminal appeal procedures. You see, once you’ve established the scientific evidence indicates that these have been deaths which do not involve intervention by a third party, the diaries become quite irrelevant.
Let’s look at it this way. Supposing in the diaries Ms Folbigg had said ‘I killed the babies’ clearly and unequivocally, ‘I did things I shouldn’t have done - I caused their deaths’. If you have a person who goes into a police station and confesses to a murder, police investigators know that you can’t immediately charge them with murder and proceed to a trial. You have first of all to examine if the confession is consistent with the scientific evidence.
There’s a whole area of study related to false confessions in which people have confessed to doing things which they couldn’t possibly have done and there are all sorts of explanations for that. [Link to the False Confessions Homepage on NetK]
We had one case in Canada where a homosexual man went into a police station and confessed to having committed a murder.
[Link to the Canada Homepage on NetK for the case of Romeo Phillion]
The reason that he did that was not because he’d actually committed the murder, he was just a little bit concerned that maybe people thought that he was a bit effeminate or a bit nancy or something like that and perhaps he should give the impression that he was a bit more of a tough-guy. He didn’t expect to get convicted – but he was. And he didn’t expect to stay in prison for any length of time – but he did. It took nearly 30 years [actually 31] to get his conviction overturned. It is well known by investigators that a confession is something that you would ‘consider’ but you must ensure that it is actually consistent with the underlying scientific evidence and if you have clear scientific evidence that’s inconsistent with a confession, then you know the confession is false.
The interesting thing about the Folbigg case is that she never made any confession at all. All she did was write some entries into the diary which are ambiguous at best and which could upon some possible interpretation be indicative of a sense of guilt or remorse and so on. So, if you imagine a woman in a situation where they have had a single baby who has died, the effect of that, the psychological effect, can be devastating. But then for a second child a third child a fourth child? Hardly surprising that she would write things in her private diary that would say I feel bad, I wonder if there is something that I did. Maybe I could have done better, that sort of thing. Perfectly understandable. But to interpret that as a confession is really most unfortunate. And to say that you would allow something like that to prevail over clear scientific evidence to the contrary indicates a basic failure of due process and the rule of law.
Jane Hansen: Well, I have to say I lost a child myself at eight months in 2004 and my diaries read very similar, of this failure on my part to keep my child alive.
Bob Moles: Of course, and that is perfectly understandable. Whenever something happens, some unfortunate event that happens to anyone that we love, we always think ‘well maybe I could have done something different’, maybe if I’d gone round and asked them to come out that evening or whatever, they wouldn’t have been there when the branch fell off the tree or something of that sort – when the car crashed or something. Of course, it’s a natural tendency to think that maybe I could have done something better and avoid this. Its perfectly understandable.
It is perfectly clear that in Ms Folbigg’s diary there is no confession. There are expressions of remorse and expressions indicative of a feeling of responsibility and that is perfectly understandable. But the scientific evidence is clear and once that scientific evidence is understood and properly applied, the diary entries become irrelevant. And so therefore, it is a basic mistake by Justice Blanch, with all due respect, to give any credibility to that, over and above the scientific evidence, that clearly establishes at least a reasonable doubt if not a very powerful explanation as to how the babies had died. And that is quite sufficient for the convictions to be set aside. The trouble with that first inquiry is that it cost well over two million dollars to conduct, it took eleven months for the evidence to be heard. And, at the end of the day, the proper principles governing criminal appeals were not properly applied. And that’s very unfortunate, isn’t it?
Jane Hansen: You and I have spoken before and we’re both a member of that club that has lost a child. You’ve lost a son - I’ve lost a son. And I can’t imagine what it would be like to actually be blamed for the loss of your child. Its bad enough if you lose your child just through happenstance.
Bob Moles: It would be utterly – I can’t – I do, I often reflect upon this and say look, how is Ms Folbigg coping and the answer is I don’t think I could even imagine how she must have had the fortitude to stand up to this over such a long period of time.
You see in the case of Sally Clark in the UK, she was a solicitor before she was wrongly accused of being involved in her children’s deaths.
[Link to Sally Clark Homepage on NetK]
When she went to prison, the prisoners there lined up and when she came into the prison, they all screamed at her and yelled ‘die bitch die’ – and then she suffered intolerable abuse while she was in there. A very upright and decent lawyer, John Batt gave up his legal practice in order to then try and do what he could to help her. He actually wrote the preface to our book on the Keogh case – and he worked assiduously to get her conviction overturned – which it was. And then two or three years after her conviction was overturned, she died of alcohol poisoning.
Jane Hansen: Dr Robert Moles says there is a clear parallel between the Kathleen Folbigg case and what happened to Lindy Chamberlain back in 1980.
[Link to Lindy Chamberlain Homepage on NetK]
Newsreader: On August 17 1980 Lindy Chamberlain, her husband Michael and her young family were spending their second night mixing with fellow campers. Moments later, Lindy’s screams pierced the air as she discovered her nine-week-old infant daughter Azaria has been snatched from her tent by a dingo. Lindy: there was a time to go and I yelled out has anyone got a torch the dingo’s got my baby.
Bob Moles: I see parallels with both the Lindy Chamberlain case and with the cases in the UK and Canada where mothers or women have been accused of shocking crimes. The legal system has set up the situation in such a way that they are processed through the legal system – with Lindy Chamberlain for example there was a lot of media about, well she didn’t cry, she didn’t seem upset, she belonged to some sort of religious group the Seventh Day Adventists and all sorts of other things which from a scientific and sociological point of view made no sense at all, but it was convenient to portray her in that role. It’s almost like the old medieval witch-hunting isn’t it?
[Link to article by Bibi Sangha on NetK linking the witch-killings in Scotland to the Lindy Chamberlain and Kathleen Folbigg cases]
Jane Hansen: Well I was going to ask do you think there’s a bit of the old patriarchy going on in the legal system.
Bob Moles: Oh without any shadow of a doubt, there is.
Jane Hansen: So, your whole career is looking at this issue of miscarriage of justice, where would you put the Kathleen Folbigg one?
Bob Moles: It is clearly at the top of the list. I mean I can’t imagine how you would make a case worse than this. There is such overwhelming evidence which cannot possibly be disputed, and still, we do not have effective procedures in place. Well, we don’t have any people in place to recognise the terrible harm that’s been done and it saddens me deeply to think that we have people who are called Solicitors-General and the Attorneys-General, very important people like that, and when they’re presented with a very clear case, they seem incapable of implementing the correct procedures to do what’s necessary to end this terrible suffering.
Jane Hansen: Do we need a criminal case review commission?
[Link to the UK CCRC Homepage on NetK - and the Australian CCRC Homepage on NetK]
Bob Moles: Well, of course we do and again this is another example of simply not being prepared to do what is clearly absolutely necessary for any properly functioning legal system. They have one in the UK that’s been working for over 20 years now, and as a result of their work they’ve overturned over 550 wrongful convictions. In America, they’ve overturned 3.000 wrongful convictions cases and these are all cases that have previously exhausted all avenues of appeal. The have set up a criminal review commission in New Zealand.
[Link to New Zealand CCRC Homepage on NetK]
They’re in the process of implementing one in Canada.
[Link to Canada CCRC Homepage on NetK including our submission to the CCRC inquiry]
Australia is virtually the only similar jurisdiction that’s done absolutely nothing about it. And with the cases that we have going around at the moment, in addition to Ms Folbigg’s case, and that are clearly wrongful convictions, we have similar issues in which the legal system seems utterly incapable of referring the matter back to the court for proper consideration and we need a circuit breaker. We certainly need a criminal review commission, and we certainly need the new right of appeal which has now been implemented in five Australian states and territories, and which needs to be implemented in the other states and territories and we need a new ‘attitude’ to wrongful convictions.
[Link to the New Right of Appeal Homepage on NetK]
We need to have the ability to simply recognise them and deal with them promptly. I mean in the UK they had four cases in which people were hanged and then subsequently had their convictions overturned and –
[Link to Death Penalty Homepage on NetK with links to the UK cases]
Jane Hansen: Bit late then!
Bob Moles: And in Henry Keogh’s case, for example, a case in South Australia, there was absolutely clear and totally compelling evidence within a few days of his conviction, that he’d been wrongly convicted and it took 20 years to get his case back to the courts for the conviction to be overturned.
[Link to the Henry Keogh Homepage on NetK – reference is to the non-disclosure of the Coroner’s report released two days after Keogh was convicted. See briefing paper.]
Twenty years of a complete and utter waste of time. It cost $100,000 a year to keep a person in prison, so just tot that up and see how much it costs. But over and apart from that in a humane and civilised society we know from any logical and rational examination of the cases that these convictions are unsound and yet for reasons that are hard to articulate or explain on any rational basis, highly qualified and high-profile people in our legal system seem incapable of doing the very job that we’ve asked them to do and appointed them to do. Its disgraceful and we need to do something about that and we need them to either do the job properly or stand aside and let others do the job for them.
Jane Hansen: Dr Moles, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Bob Moles: Thank you very much for your time.
Jane Hansen: We will see what happens, in the coming weeks.
Bob Moles: Absolutely, I look forward to it.
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Episode 5: The Diaries;Kathleen Folbigg did not give evidence at her 2003 trial where her diaries were presented by the prosecution as incriminating evidence that she had killed her children by smothering them. We put her diaries to the test with a world expert and hear what Kathleen herself had to say about the entries and what they meant.
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Episode 6 Fresh Evidence: What we learned from the first week of the latest inquiry into Kathleen Folbigg’s conviction to be presided over by former NSW Chief Justice Tom Bathurst. This episode explains the significance of the new genetic evidence."
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The entire commentary can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resurce. 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/
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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