Subtitled “How the legal system framed Robert Xie for the Lin family murders”, Urban’s latest book tells the astonishing true story of how a weak circumstantial case plus a combination of incompetence and unethical behaviour throughout the legal system, from the street to the bench, led to Xie’s convictions.
Wrongfulconvictionsreport.org has published over two dozen reports since December 2019 on the disturbing case of Robert Xie, who is currently serving a life sentence at Long Bay jail in Sydney, for the murder of five members of his wife’s family.
In FRAMED, Urban goes much further in detailing how the State deliberately framed Xie.
As Flinders University legal academic Dr Bob Moles points out, the Crown had effectively reversed the onus of proof.
Xie had an alibi confirmed by his wife, deadly to the Crown case; the Crown resorted to colluding with a prison snitch trying to negate the alibi and asserting without evidence that he sedated her.
“Yet there was no psychopharmacological evidence that she was drugged,” comments forensic psychologist Professor Ian Coyle, Fellow of the College of Forensic Psychology of the Australian Psychological Society.
The jury, acting rationally, would have entertained a reasonable doubt about the guilt of the accused.
Lindy Chamberlain’s former lawyer writes in the foreword: “I am overwhelmed by the conclusion that Robert Xie’s convictions are unsafe and unsatisfactory and my doubt is more than reasonable; it is substantial.”
Robert Xie
Xie spent four years and seven months incarcerated without a conviction. He was finally convicted after a hung jury in his third trial triggered a fourth trial in 2016/17. As he stood to hear the verdict, he proclaimed his innocence to the court in his Chinese accented English. “I did not murder the Lin family. I am innocent.”
This book sets out to prove he was telling the truth.
Publication date and sales information will be announced soon.
Urban’s previous books revealing wrongful convictions:
The Exoneration Papers – Sue Neill-Fraser