 | |
| Author | Bret Christian |
|---|---|
| Subject | True crime |
| Published | 2013 (Hardie Grant Books) |
| Media type | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781742706740 |
Presumed Guilty: When Cops get it Wrong and Courts Seal the Deal is a non-fiction book by Bret Christian, a veteran newspaper reporter and publisher based in Perth, Western Australia. It centres on a cluster of wrongful murder convictions in Perth. First published in 2013, a second edition was released in 2015.
Part 1 follows a series of crimes, beginning with the suburban 1959 murder of socialite Jillian MacPherson Brewer, and the wrongful conviction of deaf man Darryl Beamish in 1961 for that crime, and his exoneration in 2005. [1]
The most recent case cited is the 2007 murder of Corryn Veronica Ann Rayney in 2007 where the victim's husband Lloyd Rayney was charged and tried for her murder. In an exception to the other cases examined, Lloyd Rayney was found not guilty in 2012, and the verdict upheld on appeal in 2013. [2]
Part 2 is an examination of what went wrong and why with police investigations, the decisions to arrest and charge alleged perpetrators and the subsequent court hearings and jury verdicts. The author documents the historical, evidential, procedural and cognitive problems encountered by the criminal justice system en route to wrongful convictions, and extrapolates to the problems identified in the British common-law system in English-speaking countries. Book reviews, including those by individuals with close associations with the criminal justice system, have been favourable. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
In jurisprudence, double jeopardy is a procedural defence that prevents an accused person from being tried again on the same charges following an acquittal or conviction and in rare cases prosecutorial and/or judge misconduct in the same jurisdiction. Double jeopardy is a common concept in criminal law. In civil law, a similar concept is that of res judicata. Variation in common law countries is the peremptory plea, which may take the specific forms of autrefois acquit or autrefois convict. These doctrines appear to have originated in ancient Roman law, in the broader principle non bis in idem.
A jury trial, or trial by jury, is a lawful proceeding in which a jury makes a decision or findings of fact. It is distinguished from a bench trial in which a judge or panel of judges makes all decisions.
A jury is a sworn body of people (jurors) convened to hear evidence and render an impartial verdict officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a penalty or judgment.
Jury nullification (US/UK), jury equity (UK), or a perverse verdict (UK) occurs when the jury in a criminal trial gives a not guilty verdict despite a defendant having clearly broken the law. The jury's reasons may include the belief that the law itself is unjust, that the prosecutor has misapplied the law in the defendant's case, that the punishment for breaking the law is too harsh, or general frustrations with the criminal justice system. Some juries have also refused to convict due to their own prejudices in favor of the defendant. Such verdicts are possible because a jury has an absolute and unqualified right to reach any verdict it chooses, although they are usually not told of this right in the process of a trial.
Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that is committed to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted, through the use of DNA testing and working to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 2.3% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
Not proven is a verdict available to a court of law in Scotland. Under Scots law, a criminal trial may end in one of three verdicts, one of conviction ("guilty") and two of acquittal.
A miscarriage of justice occurs when a grossly unfair outcome occurs in a criminal or civil proceeding, such as the conviction and imprisonment 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.
The Western Australia Police Force, colloquially WAPOL, provides police services throughout the state of Western Australia, an area of 2.5 million square kilometres, the world's largest non-federated area of jurisdiction, with a population of 2.66 million, of which 2.11 million reside in the Perth Metropolitan Region.
Within the criminal justice system of Japan, there exist three basic features that characterize its operations. First, the institutions—police, government prosecutors' offices, courts, and correctional organs—maintain close and cooperative relations with each other, consulting frequently on how best to accomplish the shared goals of limiting and controlling crime. Second, citizens are encouraged to assist in maintaining public order, and they participate extensively in crime prevention campaigns, apprehension of suspects, and offender rehabilitation programs. Finally, officials who administer criminal justice are allowed considerable discretion in dealing with offenders.
Brian Ross Martin is an Australian jurist. He was a judge of the Supreme Court of South Australia before being appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory in 2004. He served in the Northern Territory between 2004 and 2010. He served as an acting Judge of the Supreme Court of Western Australia in 2012. In legal texts, he is referred to as "Martin (BR) CJ" to avoid confusion with his predecessor.
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 22 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.
John Button 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.
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.
Apodaca v. Oregon, 406 U.S. 404 (1972), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that state juries may convict a defendant by a less-than-unanimous verdict in a felony criminal case. The four-justice plurality opinion of the court, written by Justice White, affirmed the judgment of the Oregon Court of Appeals and held that there was no constitutional right to a unanimous verdict. Although federal law requires federal juries to reach criminal verdicts unanimously, the Court held Oregon's practice did not violate the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury and so allowed it to continue. In Johnson v. Louisiana, a case decided on the same day, the Court held that Louisiana's similar practice of allowing criminal convictions by a jury vote of 9–3 did not violate due process or equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides: "[N]or shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb..." The four essential protections included are prohibitions against, for the same offense:
Connick v. Thompson, 563 U.S. 51 (2011), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court considered whether a prosecutor's office can be held liable for a single Brady violation by one of its members on the theory that the office provided inadequate training.
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.
Corryn Veronica Ann Rayney, née Da Silva, migrated to Australia with her Indian family in 1973 as refugees from Idi Amin's Uganda. Her death occurred on or about 7 August 2007, her body being discovered a week later in a clandestine grave in Kings Park, Perth, with no clearly established cause of death. Her husband Lloyd Rayney, a prominent barrister specialising in criminal prosecution, was charged with her murder, but found not guilty after a trial before a judge only. The acquittal was unanimously upheld by a court of appeal in August 2013. The state's police commissioner and attorney general declined to acknowledge documented procedural mistakes, and refused to instigate a fresh search for the killers, leading to calls for a federal investigation into the matter.
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