Supreme Court clears Kathleen Folbigg of all convictions

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Kathleen Folbigg once labelled the nation's worst female serial killer has had her convictions for killing her four young children, quashed. Law professor and author Emma Cunliffe says the court should have apologised to Ms. Folbigg during today's proceedings.

Transcript

00:00 We saw a vindication for Kathleen Folbig and the team that has supported her today, and

00:06 also for the Australian Academy of Science, whose members saw the justice of this case

00:10 at a time when the legal profession had turned its face away from her.

00:14 The New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal has properly concluded that Kathleen Folbig's

00:18 convictions must be quashed, but I would say it squandered the opportunity to apologise

00:23 to Ms Folbig and to look carefully at why the New South Wales legal system got it so

00:28 wrong back in 2003.

00:30 In Canada, it's customary for a court of appeal when acquitting a wrongly convicted person

00:36 to apologise for the court's error and to acknowledge the heavy burden that a miscarriage

00:40 of justice places upon the wrongly convicted person.

00:44 We heard no such words today and saw no indication that the court is inclined to consider its

00:50 own role in holding an innocent woman behind bars for 20 years.

00:54 This case demonstrates extremely clearly that Australia needs an independent post-conviction

01:00 review process along the lines of the English Criminal Cases Review Commission, in which

01:06 lawyers and experts who are independent of the original prosecution process review the

01:12 reliability and the quality of evidence used to convict a person who claims to have been

01:17 wrongly convicted.

01:19 It's very clear from the passage of the Folbig case, including the first inquiry, that it

01:25 was extremely difficult for Kathleen Folbig to have her claims to innocence taken seriously

01:30 within the New South Wales legal system and every hurdle was raised in front of her as

01:36 she sought to exonerate her name.

01:39 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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