Wrongful Convictions Report

There are very substantial doubts about this case … the evidence is so weak …. it is hard to see how any conviction could stand … Tasmania’s legal system risks being a laughing stock, if it wasn’t such a tragedy. The words of Chester Porter QC on the Sue Neill-Fraser case.

Chester Porter QC and Stuart Tipple – both key players in the notorious Lindy Chamberlain miscarriage of justice – were part of the panel discussion* at the only Sydney screening (Chauvel, November 5, 2013), of Shadow of Doubt, Eve Ash’s award winning documentary about the flawed investigation that led to Sue Neill-Fraser’s conviction for the murder of her partner, Bob Chappell.   Continue reading →

By Andrew L. Urban

In her long running appeal against her 2010 murder conviction, Hobart grandmother Sue Neill-Fraser is finding new obstacles, compounded by inaccurate reporting: a fellow prisoner, Stephen Gleeson, has been charged with perverting justice (in her favour). After his hearing on March 23, 2018, the ABC’s Edith Bevan reported that prosecutor “Mr Shapiro told the court Gleeson had a number of visitors to Risdon Prison during 2017. They included Neill-Fraser’s then lawyer Barbara Etter, filmmaker Eve Ash, private detective Colin McLaren and lawyer Jeffrey Thompson.”

Eve Ash wrote to Bevin pointing out that she had never met Gleeson, never visited him in prison. Bevan didn’t reply, but her report on the ABC website was changed to: “Mr Shapiro told the court Gleeson had a number of visitors to Risdon Prison during 2017. They included Neill-Fraser’s then lawyer Barbara Etter, private detective Colin McLaren and lawyer Jeffrey Thompson. Mr Shapiro told the court the private detective was working for documentary filmmaker Eve Ash. Ash did not personally visit Gleeson in prison.”

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Andrew L. Urban

Tim Ellis SC, then Tasmania’s DPP and the man who prosecuted Sue Neill-Fraser in 2010 for murder, addressed several aspects of his prosecution – in public. It’s rare that a prosecutor speaks in detail publicly about one of his cases – especially one that is contentious. It is instructive to revisit parts of that email exchange now, three years later.

In Tasmanian Times, May 5, 2015, Tim Ellis published an email exchange between journalist Susan Horburgh of the Australian Women’s Weekly and himself, in preparation for an article she was writing about the Sue Neill-Fraser case.  (It was published on July 27, 2015.) Horsburgh put some questions to Ellis; here is an extract from their exchange, together with relevant extracts from the trial transcript.

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By Andrew L. Urban

A sensational late summer day in Hobart on Wednesday, March 7, 2018 – which I spent on a yacht on the Derwent thanks to my brother and sister in law – can in hindsight be seen as a positive omen in the Sue Neill-Fraser case. The sun shone its light into the darkness of a case that has divided Tasmanians and perplexed mainlanders who had heard of it. It was yet another hearing in her quest for leave to appeal her 2010 murder conviction under (relatively) new legislation. (Hearing continues, adjourned to June 26, 2018.)

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By Andrew L. Urban

Delays for a variety of reasons have stretched the time-line in the latest Sue Neill-Fraser appeal, since the first directions hearing, which was almost exactly a year after the relevant legislation was passed, two and a half years ago.

A winching expert witness (for Neill-Fraser) was unavailable to attend the hearings in October 2017. Since then, police have stated they have new and ‘substantial’ evidence and would call four new witnesses, in addition to cross-examining Detective Shane Sinnitt. It is understood the Crown intends to tender recordings the police seized earlier, through Detective Sinnitt during cross-examination. The footage is for a Seven Network true crime series.

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