From taking the fall for a dingo, simply being the wrong person in the wrong place, or just hopping into bed with a shady lawyer, Australia’s many miscarriages of justice are about as common and as harmful as the next flaw in the system. What’s worse is anyone could be a victim of this fault and forced to spend years behind bars for a crime they themselves never committed. More so, not even the legal professionals of the highest and respectable statures are immune from delivering this final and critical blow.

At the time of writing, Australia’s most recent wrongful imprisonment case is that of a man in Canberra who spent 82 days behind bars until a court finally found him innocent. When Steven Lewis sought compensation of $100,000, he received just $1 from the state. This kind of case is one of many, with research estimating that at any one time, there are 330 people in the District and Supreme Court system that are at risk of wrongful convictions.

According to forensic scientist and criminologist Dr Xanthe Mallett, anyone “can be in the wrong place at the wrong time” and if the case is not investigated appropriately in the first instance, it is almost impossible to prove innocence in the next. Victims can spend years of their lives going through every level in the system, and still come up short.

Civil Liberties Australia (CLA) compared the criminal justice system’s failure to completely eradicate these flaws to the urban transport system: “If [transport] was suffering four train crash deaths every three months, there would be a public outcry and the systems would shut down until all faults were found and the system is fixed.”

“But these ‘accidents’ in courts do not seem to matter as much,” says CLA chief executive officer Bill Rowlings on the comparison. “Authorities seem to think that courts are infallible and mistakes don’t matter because they are only affecting ‘a few’.”

Read more at. https://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/biglaw/28805-nightmare-of-serious-errors-how-australia-s-miscarriages-of-justice-and-wrongful-convictions-are-crippling-the-criminal-justice-system?utm_source=LawyersWeekly&utm_campaign=11_07_20&utm_medium=email&utm_content=2&utm_emailID=882dfb433067b4011c87c45ff376fe5c42fdf5fc8de3c999c59a0ade0bb38b91