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 ER 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]
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.
Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Cases of wrongful execution are cited as an argument by opponents of capital punishment, while proponents say that the argument of 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.
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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 was written by Estelle Blackburn between 1992 and 1998. The book is about the false imprisonment of two people, John Button and Darryl Beamish who were both convicted for murders that were later proved to be committed by Eric Cooke the last man hanged in Western Australia in the Fremantle Gaol.
The murder of Linda Cook was committed in Portsmouth on 9 December 1986. The subsequent trial led to a miscarriage of justice when Michael Shirley, an 18-year-old Royal Navy sailor, was wrongly convicted of the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1992 his case was highlighted as one of 110 possible miscarriages of justice in a report presented to the Home Office by the National Association of Probation Officers and justice groups Liberty and Conviction. His conviction was eventually quashed in 2003 by the Court of Appeal after the DNA profile extracted from semen samples recovered from the victim's body was proven not to be his. Cook's murder took place shortly after six sexual assaults had been committed in the Buckland area of the city, and the killer was initially dubbed the Beast of Buckland by the news media. When police revealed that footprint evidence had been recovered and launched a search for matching shoes, the case became known as the "Cinderella murder". Because of the brutal nature of the murder and the preceding sex attacks, Hampshire police were under public pressure to quickly make an arrest.
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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.
Robert Brown is a Scottish man who spent 25 years in jail for a crime he did not commit. In January 1977, Annie Walsh was beaten to death in her home in Manchester, Brown signed a confession and was found guilty at trial. He maintained his innocence throughout his prison sentence even going so far as denying himself parole by not admitting to the crime. He was released on appeal in 2002
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 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.