Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton wants juries to be allowed to lean on a panel of impartial experts in complex cases after watching another mother wrongly convicted, then pardoned.
Kathleen Folbigg was granted an extraordinary pardon in June, two decades after a jury found her guilty of three counts of murder and one of manslaughter over the deaths of her four babies.
In her first comments since Folbigg’s pardon, Chamberlain-Creighton told The Australian Women’s Weekly science was over the head of the average person sitting on a jury.
“We’re giving juries very complex tertiary and even PhD-level forensics to decipher and decide whether a person is guilty or innocent,” she said in the magazine’s November edition, published on Thursday.
“It’s not their fault if they get it wrong.”
Chamberlain-Creighton spent four years in prison for the 1980 murder of her baby Azaria until the girl’s jacket was found in a dingo lair near Uluru, torpedoing the prosecution case.
Folbigg waited even longer for freedom, despite protests of her innocence and the emerging understanding of some extremely rare genetic disorders afflicting two of her children being known during a conviction review in 2019.
Panels of experts are sometimes used in criminal court cases and are bound to give truthful evidence but those experts are often called by the prosecution or defence to suit their respective cases.
“A lot of people think that if you go to court and tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, you’ll be believed, justice will be served,” Chamberlain-Creighton said.
“But that’s not the way it works.”
Ms Chamberlain-Creughton is not alone in making the case for a panel of experts in courts of law. Stephen Cordner and Kerry Breen have just published Wrongful Convictions in Australia, arguing for independent forensic science units, and an independent criminal case review agency. The book contains the dreadful record of juryroom and bench error here; and points to how it could be fixed.
What happenned to Ms Folbigg is the worst miscarriage of justice since hanging ended here in 1967. Reform is overdue.