NSW Premier Chris Minns is urged to allow parole for Keli Lane, according to Anthony Dowsley’s exclusive report in The Daily Telegraph.
The family of convicted killer Keli Lane has made a personal plea to NSW Premier Chris Minns to release her on parole. Lane is serving an 18-year sentence for murdering her newborn daughter Tegan in 1996, writes Dowsley.
In March 2024, she became the first NSW inmate to be denied parole under “no body, no parole” laws. Lane, 51, has maintained her innocence since her 2010 murder conviction and her family believe she is the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
They remain adamant the mandatory law – which states she must reveal where she buried Tegan to be considered for parole – is “unfair, unreasonable and harsh”.
NSW’s “no body, no parole” laws were introduced in 2022, following the conviction of Chris Dawson over the 1982 murder of his wife, Lynette.
Keli Lane on day release at Dee Why with her partner (pic Daily Telegraph)
Lane is allowed supervised day release but will remain an inmate until her sentence expires in December 2028. She was last year named in NSW’s parliament as a victim of senior prison officer Wayne Astill, who in 2022 was found guilty of 27 criminal charges including sexual assaulting female inmates at Dillwynia Correctional Centre. Astill is serving a 23 year jail term.
Lane’s family say she is a model prisoner and was responsible for “initiating the inquiry into the sexual abuse of women by Wayne Astill”.
COMMENT:
A better idea?
An improvement on the no body no parole rule, unfair to the wrongfully convicted, would be the prospect of earlier parole as an inducement for the information about the location of the victim’s remains. The advantage of this approach is that the wrongfully accused (who doesn’t have the required knowledge) suffers no loss in being unable to locate the body and the guilty is ‘rewarded’ to help achieve the intent of the proposed law. The importance of the information outweighs the apparent leniency in ‘rewarding’ the killer.
Such an approach might work like this: the accused is found guilty and sentenced to 26 years, with a non parole period of 16 years, reduced to 13 years if they provide assistance to recover their victim/s within, say, 7 days of sentencing.