Media Release #3
MONDAY 10th May 2010
A petition to
Parliament will request a fairer and cheaper legal system based on a
search for the truth.
Melbourne historian Mary Cotter, who is
organising the petition, says change is essential because:
* Under the current adversarial system estimates are that up to
5% of convicted people are in fact innocent, versus an investigative
system where the conviction of innocent people is rare.
*
Under the current system more than half of the guilty get off (the
system’s numerous anti-truth devices mean that many guilty people do not
even get charged) compared to 95% of the guilty being convicted.
* Civil hearings can take years, compared with a day or less.
* The current system is thus unfair to victims, the community and
taxpayers, and is unnecessarily costly.
A truth-seeking system
convicts 95% of the guilty, and at around half of the cost of our
current system when savings in public legal bills and tax evasion are
taken into account. As Evan Whitton says in Our Corrupt Legal System,
the case for change to an improved version of a truth-seeking system is
unanswerable.
Media Release #2
THURSDAY 1st April
2010: A
grassroots campaign seeking major reform of Australia’s legal system has begun
in Melbourne, with the aim of having the adversarial legal system (imposed upon
the country along with the first convict ships) replaced with an investigative
system as is used in Europe and elsewhere.
To this end the campaigners have launched a petition, and surprising as
it may be, it is the first time (since those first shiploads of victims of our
legal system landed) that anyone in Australia has petitioned for such a change.
The
Victorian government already has plans to remove the adversarial system from
decisions on where children at risk of abuse or neglect live [The Age 1st April 2010] as it
is widely acknowledged that in Family Court disputes, as well as sexual assault
cases, the adversarial system is failing both victims and society. And the
judgement brought down yesterday [31st March 2010] by Judge Muecke in
the Manock v Channel 7 Adelaide case says much about the adversarial system’s
ability to cause serious miscarriages of justice in criminal cases, as well as the
state of defamation law under the current system.
http://netk.net.au/Keogh/Muecke1.pdf
“The
petition is attracting strong support from people with a wide range of concerns
- for example there are those whose priorities lie strongly with the victims of
crime, as well as those who are more concerned with people who more directly
suffer injustice at the hands of the system - but we are united by the petition
because a truth-seeking system is far better for both concerns, as it keeps most
of the innocent out of prison but at the same time puts more of the guilty in”
said the principal petitioner, Mary Cotter, who says that she felt compelled to
instigate the petition after witnessing hearings in the Supreme Court [of
Victoria] and subsequently in the Court of Appeal that she alleges were both miscarriages
of justice. “I want to truth to actually matter in our courts, and for our
legal system to be deserving of its other title, that of ‘justice system’.
“Far
too many innocent people are imprisoned under the current system, invariably
people on low incomes and usually living with educational and/or mental or
psychiatric disadvantage as well, while at the same time far too many guilty
people are deemed to be ‘not guilty’ due either to legal technicalities or the
suppression of relevant evidence. As well, even the often cited claim, or
should I say the admission, that our courts are not primarily concerned with either
truth or justice but with the rule of law appears to be a fallacy, as both
lawyers and judges in the present system seem to be able to ignore fundamental
rules of law and process when it suits them, whilst at the same time drawing on
such rules when it does suit. And to
date they appear to be able to do this with impunity, there is little if any
accountability - when the Court of Appeal shows as much bias in its judgement
as the court that it is supposedly reviewing, the notion that Courts of Appeal are
a safeguard against errors made in the lower courts appears to be merely an
illusion.
“Some
people have expressed the view that such change as we are petitioning for is,
although desirable, so radical as to be unachievable, but from what I have both
witnessed and subsequently learnt about how our legal system has come to be the
way it is, I firmly believe that any rational person with such facts in front
of them could only conclude that what we have ended up with is so very flawed,
and to its very core, that changing to an investigative system where truth
matters is really the only solution. The initial cost of the change-over would soon
be recouped through the cost savings made from the new system. And as a bonus,
implementing such a change at this point in time would give us the opportunity
of setting in place a ‘world’s best’ version of the investigative system.”
As both the enormous
power currently held by lawyers over proceedings and lawyers’ workloads are
greatly reduced under an investigative system, most lawyers are expected to argue
vehemently for the status quo, but one lawyer who has thrown his full support
behind the petition is Michael Kuzilny, who has a weekly program on [Melbourne’s]
Channel 31 called A Life in Crime.
Says Mr Kuzilny of our present system: “The judge or the magistrate in this outdated
adversarial system only get a bit of the real story, the truth is often
suppressed. It is basically a court game, where the prosecutors put their case
together, and the smooth lawyer puts the opposing case together. Then
there are all these rules of evidence that are not admissible.”
Copies of the petition can be
downloaded from http://truthinjusticecampaign.com
Media Release #1
Petition
will ask Parliament to change to a truth-seeking legal system
THURSDAY 11th March
2010: Historian Mary Cotter, convenor of the attached petition, says it speaks
for itself, but some further points may be made.
Justice Russell Fox, who
researched the law for 11 years after he retired from the Federal Court,
decided that truth is central to justice. He said justice means fairness;
fairness to all and morality require a search for the truth; and truth means
reality.
Unlike journalism, our lawyer-run
system does not try to find the truth. Evan Whitton estimates that since
lawyers began to defend criminals in numbers about 1790, the system’s
anti-truth mechanisms have increased from four to 24, including six ways of
concealing important evidence.
Harold Rothwax, a US judge,
said: “There is no respect for the truth, and without truth there can be no
justice.” The dire results are noted in the table in the petition.
Justice Russell Fox also said:
“The public estimation must be correct, that justice marches with the truth.” That,
and the fact that the existing system is unfair to almost everyone, means that
most voters, properly informed by the media, will support change to a
truth-seeking system.
Finally, some of those trained
in sophistry may mount a noisy resistance to the petition, but legislators can
safely ignore any such parrot-house: lawyers are a mere 0.2% of the population.