Stuart Tipple, the lawyer who represented Lindy Chamberlain, will officially launch Andrew L. Urban’s latest book, FRAMED – how the legal system framed Robert Xie for the Lin family murders, on Thursday May 8, 2025. Margaret Cunneen SC will be the special guest at the event.
Tipple has been there done that; Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of her baby’s murder but ultimately – years later – exonerated and compensated for that wrongful conviction. The system has not changed; it is as prone to error as ever, notably in the field of forensic evidence.
The launch will be held from 6pm – 7.30; refreshments will be served.
RSVP TO: andrew.urban@wrongfulconvictionsreport.org
The first five readers to accept this invitation for you & a guest will be provided with details of the venue in the Sydney CBD.
Peter. You can not possibly say that any forensic evidence is100% reliable – as you just described – contamination…deliberate or accidental. You can not know for 100% sure
Andrew. I would like an example of a clear forensic error. This must be clearly an error – General Motors under spray can’t be described as fetal blood -when a competent forensic testing laboratory would say exactly what the sample was – paint. So the police prosecutor using incompetant flexible forensics is what – a dirty rotten swine ? And how do we describe the judge that lets this vomit go thru to the keeper ? The swine’s mate ?
It is virtually impossible to land a 737 without dropping the undercart. The poor thing is screaming it’s poor little guts out . Like an innocent Australian about to be hung using forensic vomit – Little Ray Bailey. Murdered ! That action can’t be described as a pilot “error.” The judge is the pilot of this disgraceful justice machine !
Criminal negligence ? Deliberately ignoring evidence that what you are doing is lunatical ? Concealing from a jury that there is no evidence of blood in the dinghy. Is that an error – or is it bastardary ?
So Andrew – please give us little readers just one clear case of a forensic evidence error
Flying a dingoe “expert” (first class ?) from London on a lovely junket down under .
Is that an error or a deliberate bastard act ? We could discuss the planted forensics used on Scott Austic or the disappeared witnesses in the bashing murder of little John Pat.
Forensics – market place forum . Not just DNA as some would think.
An example of error please – so we can tear it apart . (honourably). No Tedeschism here….
Maybe it depends on what you define as an error. I’d say reports by former SA forensic pathologist Dr Colin Manock shown to be wrong were were in error, but that was because he was unqualified and allowed to keep operating as if he were. Incompetence is said to be more often the cause than evil intent. Mind you, shoehorning an irrelevant DNA sample into a murder trial so you can spend days with foreign ‘experts’ arguing about it, thus bamboozling the jury, probably qualifies as a bastard act.
Andrew. There is no evidence that Manock ever made an error!
Manock changed the times of death and cause of death to suit his prosecutor mates and guarantee future lucrative work. That’s not error !
Just for starters.. you may not have heard about the deaths of three babies who Dr Manock said had died from bronchopneumonia, when in fact they had been beaten to death.
Andrew. Here is a nit-picking criticism –
“Errors in the field of forensic evidence.”
Couldn’t it be more accurately described ? Surely, the use by Police Prosecutors of not just Manockistic flexible forensics but also the removing / fabrication and planting of forensic evidence is bastardry – not error ? How can this revolting humbug possibly be described as error ?
Ray Bailey and Ronald Ryan were both murdered by the “police system” and not by forensic error. In an earlier time- Lindy Chamberlain and Sue Neill-Fraser would both hang (murdered) using humbug forensic evidence – not error.
An example of forensic error in wrongful convictions would be nice Andrew . I can’t think of one –
There are forensic errors and there are forensic misrepresentations. Manock was a fraud, creating a tsunami of bad forensic reports, throwing up hundreds of cases that should be reviewed – and that’s on top of the cases that were discovered (eg Keogh, the three baby deaths…explained here).
Heinrich – here’s two of many examples of forensic error:
(1) In 2008 a Melbourne woman with no recall of what had happened when she was found semi-conscious in a toilet cubicle at Venue 28 nightclub in Doncaster went to a Critical Care Unit (CCU) in Macleod the next morning, to ascertain whether she had been sexually assaulted. The testing doctor had, 28 hours earlier at the same location, taken an unrelated swab from a woman who had had sexual relations with Mr Farah Jama. The testing of the nightclub woman was accidentally contaminated from the earlier Jama swab. 100% for sure an accident, not deliberate.
There was no evidence of Mr Jama being at the nightclub. The ONLY evidence at Mr Jama’s trial was the DNA evidence. The jury was not told about the contamination possibility, though they should have been. It’s not known how much weight the prosecutors put on Mr Jama being a Somali man from Preston when they made that decision. Mr Farah Jama was convicted of rape and sentenced to six years in jail.
Mr Jama engaged new solicitors and the contamination of the sample was discovered. After 14 months in jail, Mr Janna was acquitted at appeal and awarded $525,000 compensation. Justice Frank Vincent at the subsequent Inquiry wrote the Vincent Report which is meant to be or should be a gold standard for police and prosecutors to follow. The Vincent Report is at http://netk.net.au/DNA/Jama.pdf.
The police and prosecutors in the Robert Xie case failed dismally to follow any of Vincent’s recommendations. Their method in the Xie case was to send Stain 91, whose link to the case was in great doubt, to the highly regarded Sydney DNA experts like Clayton Walton and Simon Walsh who work for the NSW police. When the results were what the Defence wanted (that Brenda’s DNA might be in the DNA), the Xie prosecutors sent Stain 91 to New Zealand to the DNA expert there who is so highly regarded that the FBI in USA has had him training up the FBI for the last few years. No luck there – the prosecutors didn’t like those results either. I don’t know if the Xie prosecution revealed these NZ results to the Defence, but if they didn’t, I’m told it is criminally negligent of them. So the Xie prosecutors had a third throw of the dice, sending Stain 91 to USA where they struck gold – they found a DNA expert there who would – for a price – tell them what they wanted.
Here’s two shorter summaries of the Vincent Report:
https://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/JlLawInfoSci/2010/7.html
https://independentforensicservices.com.au/who-remembers-the-vincent-report/
(2) In case 23 on this website, an expert witness named Dr Dewi Evans came up with air embolism as the cause of death (by murder by Letby) of several babies. Evans said his air embolism idea cane from an article written in a journal by Dr Shoo Lee from Canada. Letby was convicted and jailed in UK. In Feb 2025, Dr Shoo Lee heard about the Letby case, and stated that Evans has completely misunderstood his article. This has led heaps of the world’s top experts to agree with Dr Shoo Lee. Ref https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/13/police-start-manslaughter-inquiry-into-senior-individuals-at-letby-hospital.
So how do the Cheshire police react to the world’s top experts in the field saying the deaths were accidental, not murders. By deciding to charge more people than Letby with manslaughter, of course, ref https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/feb/04/lucy-letby-convictions-what-did-the-expert-panel-find
This is the sort of chaos which forensic errors can cause. A forensic error by Evans, not a deliberate error. I can give you more examples if you want.