Wrongful Convictions Report

A year before Julie Rea’s exoneration for the murder of her 10 year old son, the National Academy of Sciences released a report that called into doubt the reliability of bloodstain-pattern analysis – exactly what led to Rea’s conviction, coupled with a tunnel vision investigation. This is a shocking case that condemns both, as reported by Pamela Colloff in The New York Times Magazine (Dec. 20, 2018).  Australia’s criminal justice system suffers from the same symptoms.

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Andrew L. Urban.

A former heavy duty senior detective friend of mine (now a security consultant with a caustic sense of humour) and I have a standing joke: when he mentions a convicted criminal he grins, saying to me, ‘He’s innocent, too, right?’ The joke began when talking about cases I was researching for my book, Murder by the Prosecution(Wilkinson Publishing), and names came up, like Gordon Wood. Jokes aside, it is pretty certain that a percentage of people convicted of serious crimes (here and internationally) are indeed innocent. The latest figures being quoted hover around 6% -7%.

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Andrew L. Urban.

‘Failure to search is failure to find’ goes the investigator’s mantra, and boy, does Ex-Detective Sergeant/Task Force Team Leader and latterly author Colin McLaren prove that to be true with his exhaustive and explosive book, JFK: The Smoking Gun (2013, Hachette). Now his new book is due out on January 29, 2019 – Southern Justice (Hachette), taking apart the tortured Sue Neill-Fraser case.  Continue reading →

How does the State of Victoria mange a review of 380-odd criminal convictions in the wake of revelations about Lawyer X? As the law stands, the answer is ‘with enormous practical difficulty and delay’. Legal academic Dr Bob Moles and Associate Professor Bibi Sangha suggest how a fairly simple change in the law (as enacted by both South Australia and Tasmania recently) can resolve the problem created by Lawyer X.

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Andrew L. Urban.

In the wake of the Victorian State election on November 24, 2018, Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party (probably with four shiny Upper House seats) will seek to make public on a website the register of sexual offenders currently kept by police, including the photo and address of each offender. What is the objective of this policy? Is it wise?

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Andrew L. Urban.

October 15 this year (2018) marks the 124th anniversary of the first of two dates that reverberate through the annals of justice, recalling one of the most infamous cases of a wrongful conviction – thanks to ill will and bad ‘science’. (Not much has changed.) On October 15, 1894, French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested for treason – without any credible evidence. On October 15, 1906, Dreyfus was put in command of an artillery unit at Saint-Denis – having been fully exonerated in July that year.

His crime was said to have been passing secret information to the Germans Continue reading →

Book review extract, The Spectator Australia, September 22, 2018:
“Urban makes a powerful case that grandmother Neill-Fraser, who had run a successful horse-riding school and been involved in property development, was wrongly accused and prosecuted for the murder of Chappell, a radiation physicist, her partner of 18 years.

Murder by the Prosecution is engrossing and troubling. Back and forth, the reader is propelled, much as a jury is during the ‘test match’ that a murder trial resembles.

The later stand-alone chapters on other murder trials which have been found to have been unjust stand as sentinels fortifying Urban’s impassioned premise that Susan Neill-Fraser is serving a 23 year sentence for a murder she did not commit. The ethical prosecutor works not for a particular verdict, but for justice to be done. This must be the hope for Susan Neill-Fraser.” – Margaret Cunneen SC, Deputy Senior Crown Prosecutor (NSW)