By Andrew L. Urban.
This is how it was reported in The Adeliade Advertiser: “In a Supreme Court hearing this morning (May 1, 2015) the highly controversial (Henry Keogh) case was listed for trial beginning on March 8, 2016.
Director of Public Prosecutions Adam Kimber, SC, said he could not comment on the case beyond confirming a trial date had been set.”
Tasmanian Attorney General the Hon Vanessa Goodwin is making good on her promise to introduce legislation to amend and improve the Criminal Code to enable persons convicted of serious crimes further right to appeal their convictions. On the invitation of the Justice Department, Andrew L. Urban provided the following comments on the draft Bill (on April 8, 2015, prior to the April 30 deadline). It is published here for the record.
By Andrew L. Urban.
First published in The Australian, 25/3/2015 as “Justice cast to the four winds” (p. 11)
Sue Neill-Fraser was convicted of murder in 2010, after her partner of 18 years, Bob Chappell, disappeared from their jointly owned yacht, Four Winds, anchored off Sandy Bay in Hobart on Australia Day 2009. In the afternoon, Neill-Fraser had taken the dinghy ashore, Chappell stayed on board doing maintenance work. At dawn the next morning the yacht was reported sinking slowly, with no sign of Chappell. What appeared to be a clumsy attempt at sabotage had caused the Four Winds to take on water. It was a mystery.
Examples of senior legal practitioners disregarding the law and not being held accountable for it is evident in Australia’s criminal legal system writes Andrew L. Urban.
The judges of the South Australian court of criminal appeal have accepted that Henry Keogh had been wrongly convicted of murder some 20 years ago, that new evidence shows it was an accident – yet they ordered a retrial. South Australian Director of Public Prosecutions, Adam Kimber, has asked the court for six weeks (‘longer than the ordinary four weeks your Honour’) in which the police can ‘assemble the brief of evidence and ascertain the availability of witnesses’ for a directions hearing on March 20, 2015.
“ … we conclude that the applicant has established that a substantial miscarriage of justice has occurred.” Andrew L. Urban reports.
When Henry Keogh walked out of jail just in time for Christmas 2014, he had served 10 extra years in prison because new forensic evidence that would have cleared him of murder was kept from him in 2004. “Detailed criticisms of the autopsy were specifically identified by Professor Vernon-Roberts in 2004. This information was first known by defence counsel in late 2013 when it was made available to them.” According to the appeals court judgement (at 330, R v KEOGH (No 2) [2014] SASCFC 136.)
By Andrew L. Urban
It took just one hour for the first 600 people to register a ‘Like’ on the newly launched facebook page titled ‘We want Tim Ellis fired’ on December 23, 2014, immediately after Ellis was given a suspended 4 month sentence. Ellis was the Tasmanian Director of Public Prosecutions convicted of negligent driving causing the death of 27 year old Natalia Pearn in March 2013.
“He has continued to drag this through the courts making the families [sic] pain so much worse with no remorse what so ever,” read one post (at 9.34pm), a comment which by the afternoon of December 27, 2014 had collected 1,364 ‘likes’, and the page as a whole had collected over 8,800.
Until 4pm in Adelaide on Friday December 19, 2014, Henry Keogh was a convicted murderer, as he had been for almost 20 years, since his 1995 trial for the murder of his 29 year old fiancée Anna-Jane Cheney. They were soon to be married and on March 18, 1994, they had had a pleasant evening out. After dinner, while he went to briefly visit his mother, Anna-Jane relaxed in her bath. When he returned she was dead.
Keogh tried urgent CPR after calling the ambulance, but Anna-Jane could not be revived. He has always protested his innocence and claimed to have not received a fair trial. On December 19, 2014, the Supreme Court of South Australia (Court of Criminal Appeal) agreed.
“Bureaucratic madness” is denying a dying man his legal rights to an appeal so he can clear his name of a murder conviction. By Andrew L. Urban.
On December 19, 2014, it’ll be 35 years since the day David Szach received the then mandatory life sentence for the murder of his lover, 44 year old Adelaide criminal lawyer Derrance Stevenson, which he vehemently denies.
Symposium on Miscarriages of Justice, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, Nov. 7 & 8, 2014. Andrew L. Urban reports.
Pursuing convictions at the expense of catching the actual culprits of serious crimes, grave errors at trial by prosecutors and judges alike, shocking failures of forensic evidence and a failure to learn from historic cases (such as the wrongful Lindy Chamberlain conviction 30 years ago) are some of the issues that brought together Australia’s pre-eminent lawyers and legal academics in the field (and international guest Prof. Kent Roach from the University of Toronto), wanting to improve Australia’s inadequate criminal appeals system and reduce the number of innocents sent to jail for lengthy – unjust – sentences.
By Andrew L. Urban
It is only with full confidence in our police and the courts that a democracy remains healthy and strong; that’s obvious. In a democracy, neither of these institutions should behave like their counterparts in a police state, where citizens far from being protected by the State, are endangered by it. This is why even a single miscarriage of justice in a serious crime such as murder – with its heavy penalty on the accused – must be avoided at all costs, or urgently corrected if it occurs.
[ The Neill-Fraser case: In 2010, Sue Neill-Fraser was tried and convicted of the 2009 Australia Day murder of her partner Bob Chappell on board their yacht, Four Winds, anchored in Sandy Bay, Hobart. Chappell’s body has never been found, no murder weapon was produced at her trial, there were no eyewitnesses and there is no forensic evidence linking Neill-Fraser to the murder. ]