‘Double murderer’ case overturned
In possibly the last case of its kind, the UK’s Privy Council has overturned on forensic grounds a 12-year-old conviction of a NZ man for the double murder of his wife and child.
‘Innocent’ man free after 30 years
Only the guilty leave prison: the innocent remain locked up. Catch 22 has kept Derek Bromley 30 years behind bars. Soon, even he may breathe freely again.
Keogh: 2004 Govt report clears ‘murderer’
A new ‘Right to Appeal’ law, which came into effect last month in South Australia, will consider this startling new evidence which has been in the SA Government’s hands for a decade while an apparently innocent man, Henry Keogh, remains in jail. Civil L…
Prison: Costs up, numbers up
A parliament committee, examining justice reinvestment in Australia, has produced the latest statistics on our prison system. It costs more than $300 a day to keep a prisoner in jail, and more than $600 a day to keep a juvenile in detention. Taxpayers d…
Beware! We’re on track to lose liberty
Cartoon: thanks to John Ditchburn, Inkcinct
Recent revelations of wholesale, systemic phone tapping by the USA and by police and spook agencies in Australia could be the camel that broke the elephant in the room’s back. Graham Macafee warns that self-ce…
Deaths in custody: lessons not learned
Statistics on deaths in custody mask the true number whether Indigenous or not, the President of the Indigenous Social Justice Association, Ray Jackson, says. In this interview, he outlines a number of cases worrying his organisation, which is actively…
Prison deaths rise, AIC says
Prison deaths are up, general custody deaths are about stable, over the three years of the latest report, the Australian Institute of Criminology says. But Indigenous deaths comprise about 20-30% of the total, whereas they comprise only about 3% of the…
How to save the innocent from prison
Our adversarial legal system puts innocent people in jail…too often, says Evan Whitton. If we are not to reform the basic system, and adopt the better inquisitorial approach, we desperately need a Criminal Cases Review Commission to make sure innocent…
Jails burst at seams over drugs
The more we make drugs illegal, the more people end up in jail, supported by the taxpayer at the cost of $300 or more a day. That’s right, we pay about the equivalent of a top class hotel room every day for each
Liberty loses in the Budget
Cartoon with thanks to John Ditchburn, InkcinctCivil liberties and human rights lost out in Budget 2013. Not only did they lose to the police, security-like agencies and the spooks by not receiving funds, but some civil justice and human rights areas we…