Presumed Guilty: When Cops Get It Wrong and Courts Seal the Deal

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.

Presumed Guilty: When Cops get it Wrong and Courts Seal the Deal
AuthorBret Christian
SubjectTrue Crime
Published2013 (Hardie Grant Books)
Media typePaperback
ISBN9781742706740

Synopsis

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]

References
  1. BEAMISH -v- THE QUEEN (2005) WASCA 62 SUPREME COURT OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA
  2. THE STATE OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA v RAYNEY (No 3) (2012) WASC 404
  3. The Innocence Project USA
  4. Criminal Cases Review Commission, UK
  5. BRIEF, Journal of the Law Society of Western Australia, Vol 42 No, 6 July 2015: Review by Peter Dowding SC Professor David Clarke, Dean, College of Law and Justice, Victoria University, August 28, 2014 Archived 4 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine
  6. Robert Moles, Networked Knowledge
  7. Justice Compromised, Hal G.P. Colebatch PhD. News Weekly, May 9, 2015
  8. Barless, Tim (4 August 2013). "Juries found guilty of failing too frequently to get it right". The Sydney Morning Herald.


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