John Button (born 9 February 1944 in Liverpool, England) is a Western Australian man who was the victim of a significant miscarriage of justice. Button was wrongfully convicted of the manslaughter, by vehicle impact, of his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, in 1963. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and released in 1968. The conviction was quashed in 2002. [1]
Several appeals to courts or for ministerial intervention were unsuccessful. [2] In 1998, a Western Australian journalist, Estelle Blackburn, advanced the cause of Button's vindication through her book Broken Lives . [3] Following the book's publication the case went before the courts again with Button represented by Tom Percy QC and Jonathan Davies both of whom worked pro bono on the case.
At the original trial the strongest evidence apart from Button's confession was that his 1962 Simca P60 Aronde sedan had damage consistent with an accident. Trevor Condron was the police officer who had examined John Button's Simca in 1963 but he had not been asked what could have caused the damage at the trial. He told the appeals court that while the car was damaged, the damage was not consistent with hitting a person and that three weeks before Anderson's death, Button had reported to police an accident with a Ford Prefect that had caused matching damage to that seen by Condron. This accident report had been known to police at the original trial but been discounted as irrelevant. The court also heard from Dr Neil Turner who had treated Anderson. He claimed that her injuries were not consistent with Button's vehicle. The world's leading pedestrian accident expert, American William "Rusty" Haight, was flown to Australia and testified that experiments with a biomedical human-form dummy, three Simca P60 sedans similar to that owned by John Button and a 1961/62 Holden EK sedan similar to the one serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke claimed he was driving when he hit Anderson, matched exactly Cooke's account and excluded the Simca. [4] [5]
Button self-published a book in 1998 titled Why Me Lord! which told of his ordeal. [6]
On 25 February 2002, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed Button's conviction after evidence from vehicle crash experts proved that Cooke was most likely the culprit. [7] In a televised interview six months after Button's conviction was quashed, Rosemary Anderson's parents refused to embrace the finding and still maintained that Cooke did not kill their daughter and that Button was guilty. A conference between the Button, Anderson and Cooke families, Blackburn and her publisher Bret Christian organized by Australian Story changed their minds, although Mrs. Anderson maintained Button was still responsible as it was his role as her escort on the night to bring her home. Following a meeting with the W.A. Director of Public Prosecutions to discuss the court's findings, the Andersons accepted Button's innocence was proven. [8]
Button now spearheads the Western Australian Innocence Project which aims to free the wrongfully convicted. [9] [ full citation needed ]
A miscarriage of justice occurs when an unfair outcome occurs in a criminal or civil proceeding, such as the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. Miscarriages are also known as wrongful convictions. Innocent people have sometimes ended up in prison for years before their conviction has eventually been overturned. They may be exonerated if new evidence comes to light or it is determined that the police or prosecutor committed some kind of misconduct at the original trial. In some jurisdictions this leads to the payment of compensation.
David Harold Eastman is a former public servant from Canberra, Australia. In 1995, he was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Colin Winchester and was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. A 2014 judicial inquiry recommended the sentence be quashed and he should be pardoned. On 22 August of the same year, the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory quashed the conviction, released Eastman from prison, and ordered a retrial.
Eric Edgar Cooke, nicknamed the Night Caller and later the Nedlands Monster, was an Australian serial killer who terrorised the city of Perth, Western Australia, from September 1958 to August 1963. Cooke committed at least 20 violent crimes, eight of which resulted in deaths.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) is the statutory body responsible for investigating alleged miscarriages of justice in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It was established by Section 8 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 and began work on 31 March 1997. The commission is the only body in its area of jurisdiction with the power to send a case back to an appeals court if it concludes that there is a real possibility that the court will overturn a conviction or reduce a sentence. Since starting work in 1997, it has on average referred 33 cases a year for appeal.
Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Opponents of capital punishment often cite cases of wrongful execution as arguments, while proponents argue that innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of the death penalty.
Andrew Mark Mallard was a British-born Australian who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1995 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Almost 12 years later, after an appeal to the High Court of Australia, his conviction was quashed and a retrial ordered. However, the charges against him were dropped and Mallard was released. At the time, the Director of Public Prosecutions stated that Mallard remained the prime suspect and that if further evidence became available he could still be prosecuted. He was released from prison in 2006 after his conviction was quashed by the High Court, and was paid $3.25 million compensation by the state government. The Western Australian Commission on Crime and Corruption investigated whether there was misconduct by any public officer associated with this case and made findings against two policemen and a senior prosecutor.
An innocence commission is a legal commission set up by a government for post-conviction review of cases, to try to ensure that wrongful convictions do not stand and that no innocent person is executed.
Darryl Beamish is a Western Australian man who was wrongfully convicted of wilful murder in 1961 and sentenced to death by hanging. The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was paroled in 1977. After six appeals, his conviction was finally overturned in 2005.
Colin Stanley Winchester was an assistant commissioner in the Australian Federal Police (AFP). Winchester commanded ACT Police, the community policing component of the AFP responsible for the Australian Capital Territory. In 1989 he was assassinated by an unknown perpetrator.
Estelle Blackburn is an Australian journalist who played a crucial role in the review of several controversial criminal cases in Western Australia.
Broken Lives is a 1998 non-fiction book written by Estelle Blackburn. The book is about the false imprisonment of John Button and Darryl Beamish, who were both convicted of murders committed by serial killer Eric Cooke.
Réjean Hinse was wrongly convicted of taking part in the armed robbery on 14 December 1961 of a general store in Mont-Laurier, Quebec. In 1964 he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for aggravated robbery. In April 2011, after a legal battle lasting nearly fifty years, Hinse was awarded $13.1 million compensation, payable by the Quebec and Canadian Federal governments, the largest wrongful conviction award in Canadian history.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in Canada.
The innocent prisoner's dilemma, or parole deal, is a detrimental effect of a legal system in which admission of guilt can result in reduced sentences or early parole. When an innocent person is wrongly convicted of a crime, legal systems which need the individual to admit guilt — as, for example, a prerequisite step leading to parole — punish an innocent person for their integrity, and reward a person lacking in integrity. There have been cases where innocent prisoners were given the choice between freedom, in exchange for claiming guilt, and remaining imprisoned and telling the truth. Individuals have died in prison rather than admit to crimes that they did not commit, including in the face of a plausible chance at release.
Sam Hallam, from Hoxton, London, is one of the youngest victims of a UK miscarriage of justice after an appeal court quashed his murder conviction in 2012.
Robert Brown is a Scottish man who spent 25 years in jail for a crime he did not commit, the murder of worker Annie Walsh.
The New Zealand Criminal Cases Review Commission is an independent Crown entity that was set up under the Criminal Cases Review Commission Act 2019 to investigate potential miscarriages of justice. If the Commission considers a miscarriage may have occurred, it can refer the case back to the Court of Appeal to be reconsidered.
Alan Hall was convicted of murdering 52 year old Arthur Easton in 1985 in what has been described as one of New Zealand's worst miscarriages of justice. In August 2023, the Government agreed to pay him $5 million in compensation, the largest nominal payout for wrongful conviction in New Zealand history.
Simon Hall was a British murderer who was the subject of a lengthy campaign by miscarriage of justice activists to overturn his conviction, only for him to go on to confess to the murder he was convicted of. Hall stabbed 79-year-old pensioner Joan Albert to death in her home in Capel St Mary, Suffolk in 2001, and was convicted of her murder two years later. Subsequently, the high-profile miscarriage of justice programme Rough Justice took up his case and aired a programme campaigning for him. Several MPs, Bristol University's 'Innocence Project' campaign group, his mother and his girlfriend Stephanie Hall were also involved in campaigning for him, and the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred his case to the Court of Appeal in 2009. However, the appeal court dismissed the appeal and he subsequently confessed his crime to prison authorities in 2013, before committing suicide in prison in 2014. His case was said to have gravely undermined the claims of many prisoners who claim their innocence and embarrassed miscarriage of justice activists, having proved that they had campaigned for a guilty man.