POST: Networked Knowledge Media Reports: "Under Investigation – “The Disgraceful Dr Manock.” 22 February, 2023.
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TRANSCRIPT:
GIST: "Liz Hayes: They’re the forensic detectives cracking cases with science. Hollywood heroes revealing the secrets of the dead. And Adelaide thought it had a real-life CSI star, when Dr Colin Manock arrived to become South Australia’s Chief Forensic Officer.
Associate Professor Bibi Sangha: He was very much like the pop-star of forensic pathology.
Dr Colin Manock [File Tape] There are very good reasons for carrying out post-mortem examinations.
Liz Hayes: But we’re about to reveal what a terrible mistake that was
Dr Richard Shepherd: Dr Manock isn’t a forensic pathologist – he’s a charlatan.
Liz Hayes: Tonight, a scandal unparalleled in the Western World. A forensic pathologist who’s trail of incompetence is hard to believe.
Richard Shepherd: This man has gone completely rogue
Liz Hayes: Thousands of autopsies, wrongful convictions, innocents jailed. And potential killers gone free.
Geoffrey Watson SC: Just think about how many families Manock has ruined.
Liz Hayes: And we investigate those who allowed Dr Colin Manock to operate for so long. The truth is people knew.
Richard Shepherd: Legal authorities knew and failed to do anything to stop it. Liz: Good evening, I’m Liz Hayes and this is “Under Investigation”.
March 1968. The South Australian Health Authorities are looking for a forensic pathologist to become the state’s top forensic expert at Adelaide’s Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science. It’s a role with immense responsibility. The successful applicant will carry out or supervise all autopsies in the state and testify in criminal trials. Often being the persuasive
voice in innocence or guilt. A young lecturer at Leeds University in the UK applies for the job. His name is Dr Colin Manock.
Bibi Sangha: Adelaide, being quite Anglophile would have said there’s this man from England who speaks very confidently, who probably knows what he’s saying
Liz Hayes: Manock was vastly inexperienced for this senior job and yet he got it and moved to Adelaide that same year.
Geoffrey Wallace: He was a UK university lecturer it all looks great.
Manock [file tape] A series of post-mortem examinations following medical death certificates showed that about 50 % were wrong
Geoffrey Watson: He’s got a polished accent and he sounds very convincing and he presents very well. Well, that’s just a recipe for disaster because it was all covering up the fact that he didn’t have the qualifications
Liz Hayes: The South Australian authorities urged Manock to obtain the qualifications he lacked, but he never would. Because he knew that he didn’t have the qualifications, didn’t he?
Bob Moles: Of course, he did, absolutely, if anybody knew, he knew.
Liz Hayes: Joining me tonight, experts who will help me unmask those responsible for Dr Manock’s seemingly irresistible rise. Knowingly employing someone who didn’t have the qualification? That’s really where it started, they knew.
Bob Moles: Well, that’s the problem.
Liz Hayes: Dr Robert Moles, an Adelaide lawyer who waged a thirty-year campaign to reveal the truth about Manock.
Bob Moles: They had him doing the work, knowing all the time, he actually wasn’t qualified to do it at all.
Liz Hayes: Professor Bibi Sangha of Flinders University who tried to overturn convictions based upon Manock’s flawed forensic reports.
Bibi Sangha: The role of a forensic pathologist is probably more important than that of a prosecutor, a judge or jury. So, it’s almost like a God-like figure.
Liz Hayes: Geoffrey Watson SC, a leading Sydney barrister who is calling for a public inquiry into the Manock scandal.
Geoffrey Watson: When you talk about the size of the scandal, what I can’t understand is, that this could go on for so long. I can imagine a liar fooling people, judges, juries, lawyers for say three years, maybe even five years – this went on for thirty years.
Liz Hayes: And from London, forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd who’s performed more than 23,000 autopsies, including that of Princess Diana.
Richard Shepherd: It is just an unbelievable set of situations. When people began to realise the problems they were causing, why didn’t they do something then to stop him?
Liz Hayes: Once he was given the job as South Australia’s pre-eminent forensic pathologist, Dr Manock gave expert testimony in case after case. And almost from the start he began to get them terribly wrong.
July the 15th 1971 A fifteen-year-old girl, Deborah Leach is found murdered on an Adelaide beach. She was last seen alive at 4pm that day. Her stomach contents will ultimately convict the police suspect, Frits Van Beelen, because Dr Manock claimed they enabled him to establish an accurate time of death. And he put that time of death precisely at 4.30pm. Any later and Van Beelen wouldn’t have been at the beach and could not have committed the crime. But even in the 1970s, this was highly dubious science and it was devastating for Frits Van Beelen. He was sentenced to death, later commuted to life in prison. Dr Richard Shepherd, acknowledged as one of the world’s leading forensic pathologists has a very clear opinion of Manock’s claim.
Richard, you’ve looked at this case. Can you determine time of death through stomach contents?
Richard Shepherd: The history of forensic pathologists determining the time of a death is littered with disasters like this. The answer to your question is no you cannot in any way shape for form determine the time of death.
Liz Hayes: Well, he was adamant wasn’t he Bob Moles because he was pushed on this?
Bob Moles: Van Beelen’s defence lawyer at the time said could you be sure that she was dead by 4.30 and no later. Dr Manock said that he could. And he was then pressed, well, maybe five or ten minutes? No, no, it couldn’t be five or ten minutes later.
Richard Shepherd: You cannot be that precise, it simply is not possible. He’s using something that is very shady, very dodgy even at that time and he’s expressing a view that subtly chimes in exactly with what the prosecution and the police want him to say. So, I look on it and I say it is complete rubbish. You cannot make that assessment.
Liz Hayes: It is influential in the court, this kind of statement?
Geoffrey Watson: This sort of evidence – it’s devastating. That’s what juries latch onto. It turns cases and he would have known that he was doing that. He would have known time after time after time that his evidence was crucial.
Liz Hayes: Coming up - Dr Manock goes from bad to conducting an autopsy in public – to outrageous!
Bob Moles: Can you imagine anything more horrendous?
Liz Hayes: As our case against him mounts
Richard Shepherd: This seems to have been a diagnosis literally plucked from the air!
Liz Hayes: And his evidence goes unchecked.
Geoffrey Watson: Who knew what in South Australia at the critical time?
Bob Moles: The prosecutor in the Emily Perry case is now one of Australia’s leading judges. Liz Hayes: That’s next on Under Investigation.
It’s a legal scandal unlike any other in the world. The extraordinary case of Dr Colin Manock. For decades, South Australia’s Chief Forensic Officer – who was never qualified to hold the job. Whose very questionable scientific opinion helped send men and women to prison for murders they didn’t commit. As our investigation continues, we’ll examine the roles of senior legal figures in South Australia whose actions allowed Manock to operate but who have never been called to account.
Richard Shepherd: It was a real collusion by the whole coronial legal system to accept Dr Manock as being an expert when in fact he clearly wasn’t.
Liz Hayes: By the late 1970s Manock’s forensic opinions and his methods are virtually unchallengeable. He’s testified in scores of criminal cases and conducted thousands of autopsies. In 1978 he attended to a suspected murder case in the tiny South Australian town of Mintabie. The victim was an aboriginal man. With Manock is a young policeman Peter Whellum who claims Manock conducts an autopsy of the body in public.
He advised me he would conduct the post mortem examination in the open air on Lake Mintabie. [Quote from Whellum affidavit]
Bob, this young policeman at the time gave an affidavit afterwards, Bob Moles: Yes he did
Liz Hayes: To say what he saw because he was so devastated.
Bob Moles: Its horrendous, I mean we’re talking about a small aboriginal town, and Dr Manock asks for two empty oil drums to be brought over, a sheet of corrugated iron to be placed on top, for the man’s body to be stripped off and placed on top of the corrugated iron and then he takes out his tools, and begins to open up the chest of the man,
Dr Manock dipped a metal ladle into the bodily fluids and blood within the trunk of the body. He held the ladle in front of him at arms-length and facing the group he commented loudly, anyone for soup? [Quote from Whellum affidavit]
Can you imagine anything more horrendous?
Liz Hayes: I think Peter Whellum said that he had actually sought a more private location – a pub I think and had approval to do that and Dr Manock rejected that idea?
Bob Moles: Yes, that’s right. He said there’s a pub over there, it’s got a cool room attached to it and Dr Manock said ‘no’ we’re actually going to do it in front of everybody, and treat it as a bit of theatre.
Liz Hayes: It’s a tiny, tiny town, and to conduct an autopsy in public on some corrugated iron held up by a couple of drums, when he had options to do it elsewhere, talk me through your thoughts Richard.
Richard Shepherd: I simply cannot believe that any person, any doctor, any pathologist would do that. I just think this is such a degrading act, I, I have actually no words that I can think of to describe this. I cannot believe that anyone would do this in any way, unless, unless they were aiming to show their power and domination. This speaks more to the man’s psychology than his obvious and fundamental lack of pathology.
Liz Hayes: July 24th 1981. Emily Perry, Adelaide’s so-called ‘black widow’ is convicted following on Dr Manock’s testimony that she tried to poison her husband Ken with arsenic. It will later be shown that Ken Perry may have accidentally ingested arsenic from rat poison found in old pianolas that he could have come into contact with while restoring them. Ken though is never physically examined by Dr Manock. But in court, as the state’s expert
witness, Manock paints a picture of a meticulous murder attempt by the 55-year-old Mrs Perry. She is convicted and sentenced to 15 years hard labour. Richard, how on earth do you think Dr Manock could have come to these conclusions?
Richard Shepherd: This seems to have been a diagnosis literally plucked from the air.
Bibi Sangha: But it’s interesting that in both the Emily Perry case and in a number of other cases Manock was often criticised for engaging in speculation and that was the consistent theme he would speculate to the tenth degree and nobody would pull him up until it started unravelling.
Bob Moles: And the law is quite clear, speculation is not admissible on the part of an expert witness.
Liz Hayes: But having relied upon Dr Manock’s emphatic but highly dubious scientific testimony to convict Mrs Perry, the prosecution’s case was thrown out in the Australian High Court. One of the judge’s - Justice Lionel Murphy went as far as to say Dr Manock’s forensic evidence was ‘not fit to be taken into consideration’. Lionel Murphy Geoffrey was pretty clear in what he thought about Dr Manock, I mean, how quickly would that have got around?
Geoffrey Watson: Justice Murphy knew that Manock was not qualified – and he was saying it. In terms of the impact of a decision by a High Court judge telling a prosecuting authority that they should not use a witness – that’s devastating. You would never come back from that. In an ordinary world that would mean that that expert would no longer be testifying in critical cases.
Liz Hayes: But he is so what does that say?
Geoffrey Watson: This won’t be the last time that I say this. What we don’t know is who knew what in South Australia at the critical times, and why they weren’t doing something about this.
Bob Moles: I think the interesting thing is that the prosecutor in the Emily Perry case is now one of Australia’s leading judges.
Liz Hayes: Brian Martin KC became a South Australian Supreme Court judge, then Chief Justice of the Northern Territory Supreme Court and has served in other senior judicial roles. A prosecutor in the 1980s he was aware that Dr Manock and his work in the Emily Perry case was thoroughly discredited in the High Court, but as you’ll see, he used Manock as an expert
forensic witness in another high-profile case just three years later. Geoffrey, is the prosecutor legally required to advise of this deficiency?
Geoffrey Watson: A prosecutor’s duties are very very different to those of an ordinary barrister, because a prosecutor is not seeking a successful result at all costs.
Liz Hayes: Leading Sydney barrister Geoffrey Watson says it’s incumbent upon prosecutors to ensure the veracity of their expert witnesses.
Geoffrey Watson: You’re representing the people, the state, and what we’re actually after as people as a state is a fair trial and a fair conviction, and what we’re seeking to avoid is an unfair conviction. So, the duties cast upon a prosecutor are different, they’re more onerous and I just cannot understand how Manock could have been presented to a jury as a man of science following Justice Murphy’s judgment.
Liz Hayes: But Manock continued to give evidence, and his competence continued to be questioned. In 1984 in the case of young aboriginal man Gerald Warren, his work appeared to border on the absurd. Dr Manock determined Gerald Warren had died after accidentally falling from a moving car. Strange markings found on Warren’s face and hand were, according to Manock impressions made in the skin from his corduroy jeans.
Bob Moles: Whilst the young man fell from the moving vehicle, his face and his hand must have come into contact with his corduroy trousers, which caused these marks. It was subsequently established that in fact, he’d been beaten with the threaded end of a metal scaffolding pipe and then he’d been run over by a utility vehicle backwards and forwards on several times.
Liz Hayes: Two men would eventually confess to beating Gerald Warren to death and repeatedly driving over his body. Then in 1992 came the death of Peter Marshall. Now Peter Marshall is an extraordinary case -this is a man who was found on the floor in his bedroom?
Bob Moles: That’s right,
Liz Hayes: In a pool of blood. Dr Manock examined him and failed to realise he’d been shot. Dr Manock decided he’d had an aneurism or fallen from his bed?
Bob Moles: That’s correct, yes. He’d been sleeping in his unit which was on the ground floor with the window open and apparently his body was found beside his bed with blood pooling around his head and Dr Manock when he visited the scene said ah I think he might have bumped his head on the bedside cabinet as he fell out of bed, or he might have had an
aneurism. So, there’s not a suspicious death. And so the body was taken back to the mortuary, and it was only a couple of days later that they put the body through a scanner and they found that he’d been shot in the head and he’s got a bullet lodged in his brain.
Liz Hayes: Far from dying of natural causes as Dr Manock had initially found, it was believed that Marshall was the victim of a suspected domestic dispute. Again, Manock had spectacularly missed a murder. Two suspects in the case died before charges could be brought against them. Richard?
Richard Shepherd: This is just unbelievable. I cannot even begin to pick the holes that are so obvious. He would just say anything. It seems to me this man has gone completely rogue. He is just thinking what he wants to think and there is no challenge.
Liz Hayes: Coming up - Geoffrey, the Keogh case – another alarm bell?
Geoffrey Watson: By this stage the fire is raging, it is burning down the house.
Liz Hayes: How Manock’s flawed evidence helped put a man behind bars for twenty years. Henry Keogh: It’s institutional failure on a massive scale.
Liz Hayes: That’s next on Under Investigation.
The case of Dr Colin Manock is one of the world’s most unforgivable legal scandals. In our investigation tonight we’ve shown how the barely qualified pathologist held South Australia’s most senior forensic post for decades – despite case after case where he got it terribly wrong. A man sentenced to death [Frits Van Beelen] a public autopsy [Mintabie] and two cases of murder that Manock completely missed [Marshall and Warren].
Richard Shepherd: This is just unbelievable. I cannot even begin to pick the holes that are so obvious.
Liz Hayes: But if what Manock did is shocking in the extreme, perhaps equally shocking is how he got away with it. As our investigation continues, we’ll examine three cases involving Senior South Australian judicial officers, who by their actions, excused Manock’s incompetence and highly dubious testimony and allowed a grave injustice to occur.
Geoffrey Watson: What goes wrong is when he’s presented to courts, to juries as an expert - and that’s just inexcusable.
Liz Hayes: The prosecutor [Paul Rofe QC], the coroner [Wayne Chivell], and South Australia’s former Solicitor-General [Chris Kourakis QC].
Richard Shepherd: When people began to realise the problems he was causing, why didn’t they do something then to stop him?
Liz Hayes: Between 1994 and 1995 Adelaide Coroner Wayne Chivell held an inquest into the deaths of three babies who had died suddenly in separate incidents. Three-month-old Storm Deane, nine month old Billy Barnard, and Joshua Nottle also aged nine months. Dr Colin Manock had conducted the autopsies and found all three babies died of natural causes or ‘rough play’. But Coroner Chivell’s inquiry revealed shocking injuries completely missed or utterly misread by Dr Manock.
Bibi Sangha: These were cases where I think the police finally thought this is just not right. They brought their concerns to other doctors and then they went to see the Coroner and said we have got serious reservations about the autopsies.
Liz Hayes: Richard Shepherd, Dr Manock suggested some of these injuries were the result of rough play, resuscitation, birth trauma, what did you think when you first looked at that?
Richard Shepherd: Well, I think the description of the injuries, the x-rays, the photographs, they are just screaming child abuse they are screaming out that this child has been injured deliberately, non-accidental injuries, I think it was a fractured spine, multiple fractured ribs, fractured limbs these things just do not happen they don’t happen even in the roughest of play, in the most devastating circumstances. This is child abuse it has to be.
Liz Hayes: Coroner Chivell concluded Manock’s autopsies were so flawed they’d achieved the opposite of its proper purpose and had prevented police investigating potential crimes of child abuse or even murder. Geoffrey, crimes potentially were committed and no one answered to them?
Geoffrey Watson: I suppose when you look at the terrible, terrible things that have happened in our community you get very few worse than taking away the life of a baby and he – I’ve read the Coroner’s report and its quite clear what happened here. Manock, he missed a skull fracture which was available on an x-ray, he described a cigarette burn on a baby’s buttock as having been unresolved nappy rash.
Bob Moles: And the Coroner said that Dr Manock had claimed to have seen things that could not have been seen, and that in answer to some of the questions on oath, he’d given answers that were ‘spurious’ which really means not honest.
Liz Hayes: Richard how is it that a forensic pathologist can examine the bodies of three babies who have some serious physical injuries and decide its pneumonia?
Richard Shepherd: Well, I think that we’ve established that Dr Manock isn’t a forensic pathologist. What strikes me as interesting is that it is only when he goes against the police against the prosecution, against taking people to trial for murder that the state suddenly seems to swing against him. Finally, it is beginning to come clear what a desperately incompetent awful pathologist this man was.
Liz Hayes: Wayne Chivell’s report was utterly damning of Dr Manock, which makes what happened next so astonishing. In a separate and unrelated case running at the same time forty- one-year-old Henry Keogh was standing trial for the murder of his fiancée, Anna-Jane Cheney. Dr Manock was appearing as an expert forensic witness. Geoffrey, the Keogh case, another alarm bell?
Geoffrey Watson: By this stage the fire is raging, its burning down the house. Something’s got to give here, something’s got to have to happen.
Liz Hayes: Of course, Coroner Chivell’s report would have immediately cast doubt on Manock’s standing as a forensic expert. So, Wayne Chivell chose not to release it until after the murder case was concluded. But by that stage, Henry Keogh had been convicted, largely on Manock’s evidence and sentenced to twenty-six years in prison.
Bob Moles: I would say that was a major error because the Coroner represents the Crown, the Crown knows that Dr Manock’s evidence is unreliable and that he’s untruthful and that he claims to have seen things that couldn’t have been seen - and then in Mr Keogh’s case he then proceeds to commit the same mistakes again.
Geoffrey Watson: When the Coroner says I’m not going to release this because it might interfere with the trial, it can only interfere with the trial one way - which is - in favour of Mr Keogh, and that itself demonstrates a slanted view on the way that a prosecution should proceed.
Liz Hayes: Can he do that?
Geoffrey Watson: One thing is for certain, that the Crown should not have allowed that trial to proceed if anyone was aware of that information in the prosecution branch. It should have been stopped.
Liz Hayes: But the prosecutor in the Henry Keogh case should also have been well aware of Manock’s failings. As the Director of Public Prosecutions Paul Rofe QC had used Manock in many previous trials and must have known the infamous High Court ruling in the Emily Perry case thirteen years before with its damning judgement that Dr Manock’s evidence was ‘not fit to be taken into consideration’.
Bibi Sangha: At the Henry Keogh trial, the prosecutor held Dr Manock out as the most experienced forensic pathologist with many years of experience who had conducted thousands of autopsies, so he was in effct telling the jury this is a man you should trust.
Henry Keogh: I came home, the house was in semi-darkness and I saw her slumped and I thought, hoped, unconscious in the bath. I called out her name, no response. Pulled her out:
999 call – there’s been an accident in the bath, I think she’s drowned – is she out of the bath yet – I just got her out – I tried mouth to mouth
Liz Hayes: Police initially assumed Keogh’s fiancée Anna had simply slipped in the bath. Manock had conducted an autopsy but it was only after Anna’s body had been cremated that he took another look at the case. Working only with photographs, most of them black and white, Manock then determined he was looking at a deliberate drowning.
Henry Keogh: He claimed that there were bruises that supported his theory of a handgrip. Where I’m supposed to have grabbed Anna’s leg, lifted it up, and held her under the water that way.
Liz Hayes: The bruises Manock claimed were evidence of a grip-mark on Anna’s leg were much later revealed not to have been bruising at all.
Henry Keogh: So, he had made all that up. And he actually lied about the thumb-print, which was a bruise. It wasn’t a bruise at all. Nothing there.
Liz Hayes: Manock’s forensic analysis was again tragically wrong. Turning Henry Keogh from innocent man to murderer. With two of the states most senior judicial officers Coroner Wayne Chivell and prosecutor Paul Rofe [QC] having direct and unequivocal knowledge that Manock’s evidence in past cases had been discredited.
Henry Keogh: Institutional failure on a massive scale. He was a bloke who got appointed when he shouldn’t have been, and when it was discovered that he wasn’t up to the task, they failed to dislodge him.
Richard Shepherd: In a sense the courts and people - the police - were prepared to accept him and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know, he became an expert by the fact that he did it, now that is not how we become experts. But the Coroner was prepared to accept him the courts were prepared to accept him. There was a real collusion by the whole coronial legal system to accept Dr Manock as being an expert when in fact he clearly wasn’t.
Liz Hayes: But South Australia’s judicial behaviour was to become even more questionable in the case of Henry Keogh. In 2004 the state’s Solicitor-General Chris Kourakis received a forensic report finding there was not sufficient evidence Henry Keogh’s fiancée Anna was murdered. That instead she had probably fallen accidentally in the bath, as the police had suspected at the time. But for reasons that have never been publicly explained Solicitor- General Kourakis who is now the state’s Chief Justice did not produce that report while in office and it was not produced for almost a decade while Henry Keogh languished in prison.
Bob Moles: The report was received by the Solicitor-General in 2004 and released in 2013, nine years later. The unfortunate thing is that the Solicitor-General in 2004 was then appointed to be a judge of the Supreme Court and today is the Chief Justice in South Australia.
Liz Hayes: Dr Colin Manock retired in 1995 shortly after his testimony that would help send Henry Keogh to prison for decades. Henry Keogh’s appeal in 2013 finally saw him freed after twenty years.
News program: the man at the centre of one of South Australia’s biggest ever legal controversies, will be paid more than 2.5 million dollars by the state government.
Liz Hayes: But is there one final shocking case in Manock’s dreadful legacy?
Coming up - still behind bars after thirty-eight years. How important is Manock’s testimony in this case?
Bibi Sangha: It is important because it is used to corroborate what the eye witness said that he saw.
Liz Hayes: Is this man the final casualty of Dr Manock’s disgraceful career? Geoffrey Watson: The time has come. South Australia needs to address this issue. Liz Hayes. That’s next on Under Investigation.
Our investigation of South Australia’s chief forensic scientist for over thirty years has revealed a shocking trail of incompetence: Screen shots -
[case 1 – murder 1971 Frits Van Beelen -
case 2 suspected murder 1978
case 3 attempted murder Mrs Emily Perry
case 4 accidental death 1984 Gerald Warren
case 5 accidental death 1992 Peter Marshall
cases 6, 7, 8, natural causes 1994/5 Storm Dean, Billy Barnard, Joshua Nottle case 9, murder 1995 Henry Keogh
Innocent men locked up – potential killers gone free – all thanks to Dr Colin Manock. And as we’ve shown Manock was seemingly supported at every turn by members of South Australia’s legal fraternity. There is one more case that we will examine tonight. That of Derek Bromley who has been behind bars for 38 years. Is he the final casualty of Dr Manock and the system that backed him. It’s April the 4th 1984. The body of twenty-one-year-old Steven Docoza is found floating in Adelaide’s River Torrens. Derek Bromley, an aboriginal man and his alleged accomplice are convicted of murder. The only eye witness will later be questioned due to his severe mental illness which meant the claims of what he saw were unreliable.
Bob Moles: The eye-witness happened to have been a person who was suffering from a schizo-affective disorder and was having both visual and audible hallucinations on the evening that the event occurred.
Liz Hayes: Dr Manock gives evidence that directly supports the questionable eye-witness account in which he claimed to have seen a fight near the river.
Bob Moles: And Dr Manock gave a description of the injuries that matched the eye-witness description of having been punched, kicked, dragged along the ground and then drowned. But the remarkable thing was that the eye-witness account almost exactly matched Dr Manock’s account of the injuries having been caused at or about the time of death.
Liz Hayes: But it’s the prosecutor in the Derek Bromley case who also warrants examination. Brian Martin KC should have already been fully aware of Dr Manock’s failings. As you’ll recall, less than three years before Derek Bromley was convicted, Martin had successfully prosecuted Emily Perry for the attempted murder of her husband. The High Court threw out that conviction with a damning judgment of Dr Manock’s evidence saying it was ‘not fit to be
taken into consideration’. But still Brian Martin used Manock to give evidence when prosecuting Derek Bromley. Bibi how important is Manock’s testimony in this case?
Bibi Sangha: It’s important because it’s used to corroborate what the eye-witness said he saw and also the very particularised injuries that he said were caused just prior to his death.
Liz Hayes: But according to Adelaide lawyer Robert Moles other forensic experts said Manock got it completely wrong. The victim’s injuries they said were more likely to have occurred while the body was in the water. But despite those serious doubts about Manock’s forensic evidence Derek Bromley remains in prison after thirty-eight years - denied parole because he refuses to admit his guilt. He is refusing to say he did this crime and that’s why he sits there?
Bob Moles: Yes, at the end of his non-parole period after 24 years, he applied for parole and they asked him how he felt about what he did, and he said look, I’m very sorry, I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it, and they said well, that’s not acceptable. You’re not owning up to your terrible behaviour and because of that you’re not fit to be released.
Liz Hayes: Derek Bromley has repeatedly been denied leave to appeal his case. It is now in the hands of Australia’s High Court. Remember, it’s the same court that in 1982 ruled that Dr Manock’s evidence ‘was not fit to be taken into consideration’. So, our experts believe the High Court should give priority to Derek Bromley whose thirty-eight years behind bars is inextricably linked to Dr Manock. We can’t get away from the history and the history shows that miscarriages of justice have occurred because of Dr Manock’s lack of expertise?
Richard Shepherd: Yes. Here was a man finding that he has immense power, and has just continued blindly making things up and moving things on with the support, it has to be said, of the legal authorities who knew and who failed to do anything to stop him.
Liz Hayes: Coming up.
Bob Moles: All of those cases are in question. We don’t know which ones of those might have been murders.
Liz Hayes: It’s a scandal unparalleled in the Western world. The truth is people knew? Geoffrey Watson: People knew very high up in the system.
Liz Hayes: Yet, South Australia still refuses to act.
Geoffrey Watson: Just think about how many families Manock has ruined. We deserve the truth.
Liz Hayes: That’s next on Under Investigation.
Bibi Sangha: The role of a forensic pathologist is probably more important than that of a prosecutor, a judge, a jury. So, it’s almost like a God-like figure.
Liz Hayes: If only the scandal of Dr Colin Manock was fiction. A book that could be closed and forgotten.
Geoffrey Watson: When you talk about the size of the scandal, what I can’t understand is that this could go on so for so long.
Liz Hayes: But, as we’ve shown tonight, Dr Manock’s disgraceful career was terribly real. And that makes it almost unbelievable.
Richard Shepherd: It was a real collusion by the whole coronial legal system, to accept Dr Manock as being an expert when in fact he clearly wasn’t.
Liz Hayes: From 1971 when Frits Van Beelen was sentenced to death, largely on Manock’s dubious evidence.
Geoffrey Watson: I can imagine a liar fooling people, judges, juries, lawyers for say three years, maybe five years, but this went on for thirty years.
Liz Hayes: To question about one of Australia’s longest serving prisoners, still in gaol after 38 years. The history shows that miscarriages of justice have occurred because of Dr Manock’s lack of expertise?
Richard Shepherd: Yes.
Liz Hayes: Case after case over decades. To conduct an autopsy in public.
Bob Moles: Can you imagine anything more horrendous.
Liz Hayes: And even when he could have been stopped this unqualified forensic pathologist wasn’t.
Henry Keogh: Institutional failure on a massive scale
Liz Hayes: Manock retired in 1995 and is believed to be living in a retirement home. He has never had to account for his actions. Nor has the South Australian judicial system – and the individuals within it who by their decisions protected Manock for all those years. Dr
Manock’s flawed testimony caused enormous harm. His incompetence undermined the South Australian justice system and ruined the lives of individuals, many of whom were already suffering the loss of loved ones.
Geoffrey Watson: The time has come. South Australia needs to address this issue. Barrister Geoffrey Watson who has served as council assisting at inquiries in New South Wales believes a public inquiry or Royal Commission is the only way justice can be served for those impacted by Manock in his reported ten thousand autopsies and over four hundred criminal cases. Not to do so he says would just continue the protection Dr Manock enjoyed during his career.
Geoffrey Watson: What we don’t know is who knew what in South Australia at the critical times and why they weren’t doing something about this.
Liz Hayes: The truth is, people knew.
Geoffrey Watson: People knew very high up in the system about the flaws in Manock’s approach and his skills. The fact that they papered over it – that needs to be exposed as well. Just think about how many families Manock has ruined. Think about the lives wrecked. We deserve the truth.
Liz Hayes: and Richard from your perspective, the fact that this hasn’t been dealt with in Australia what does is say?
Richard Shepherd: Well, I have to say, I think there is a huge inertia in the states to ever face up to these problems – it’s sort of too big to face! They can sort of manage one case maybe, but this is ten thousand cases, four hundred prosecutions, its massive.
Liz Hayes: But it’s the very magnitude of the scandals says Dr Richard Shepherd, one of the world’s most respected forensic pathologists, that means an inquiry is required.
Richard Shepherd: It is an awful thing to have happened. But to leave it festering is even worse. It is a boil that has to be lanced and the state and the country have to learn from what it discovers.
Bibi Sangha: The fact that Dr Manock is retired and isn’t performing any further havoc on the legal system is irrelevant. It’s something we should learn from.
Liz Hayes: Although professor Bibi Sangha says some may not welcome revisiting this dark chapter in South Australia’s legal history.
Bibi Sangha: It is the state that should face up to the problems it has created and have an honest and open inquiry. And it’s a lesson we can all learn from.
Bob Moles: There is no doubt at all that people who were in positions of authority and know better and should act better are failing to do their duty.
Liz Hayes: The former and current judicial officers we’ve named – Brian Martin, Chris Kourakis and Wayne Chivell all declined to speak to us. Former prosecutor Paul Rofe has since died. Dr Robert Moles has also lodged formal submissions with successive South Australian Attorneys-General to open a public inquiry including John Rau, Vicky Chapman, Michael Atkinson, and the State’s current Attorney-General Kyam Maher. He’s been told ‘no’ by each one despite the uncertainty over every case Manock was involved with.
Bob Moles: Because all of those cases are in question. We don’t know which ones of those might have been murders. We don’t know which one’s of those might have been non- accidental injuries and it’s going to be terribly sad to go back to ten thousand families and say do you know the autopsy on your loved one was done by somebody who was unqualified and didn’t know what they were doing. And I can see why some people might say, well, let’s not trouble them, let’s pretend that it never happened. But this will always sit around as something that’s going to fester and make things worse. We have to face up to it and do something about it.
Liz Hayes: Even though Dr Manock has retired, the great shame that remains is South Australia’s. There are those in authority who allowed Manock to continue even when there was overwhelming evidence against him. And those in South Australia’s recent government who’ve refused to back a public inquiry or Royal Commission. I think we all agree it’s time to draw a line under the man considered to be by so many as the disgraceful Dr Manock. I want to thank you all very much for joining us and I thank you – I’m Liz Hayes. Goodnight."
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The entire script can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. 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;
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/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
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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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-1234880143/
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