Wrongful Convictions Report

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.

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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.

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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.

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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. ]

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By Andrew L. Urban

Several serious legal errors were made at the 2010 trial of Sue Neill-Fraser, any one of which warrants the murder conviction being set aside, according to a legal expert in miscarriages of justice, Dr Bob Moles.

“The evidence given to the court by the forensic scientist was totally inadmissible. This error warrants the conviction being set aside.”

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By Andrew L. Urban

In what acclaimed legal expert Dr Bob Moles describes (60 Minutes, 9 Network, Sunday, August 24, 2014) as the worst miscarriage of justice in 40 years, the 2010 murder conviction of Sue Neill-Fraser has now been fatally and forensically undermined with the latest report from the Victorian Police Forensic Services Department.

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