Why the Two Reports?

looking at these articles discussing this phenomena this week. What's the overview of what's been going on.

School and the Michigan State University College of Law. And they actually have a National Registry of Exonerations and they released a report this week and on their website they say there's currently been two one hundred and eighty three exonerations, so that's over the period that they've been counting, and they've talied that that's more than nineteen thousand, one hundred

and ninety years lost. So they tallying up all of those prison sentences of innocent people, of innocent people, innocent people in America have lost nineteen thousand, one hundred and

ninety years. But specifically, this report looked at the most recent exonerations and they estimated that in the United States, one hundred and thirty nine convicted defendants were exonerated last year, and I thought it was very interesting because The New York Times ran an article focusing specifically on how much a lot of those exonerations can be put down to the work of dedicated lawyers and private organizations that were

actually focusing specifically on wrongful convictions. And so what the New York Times reported was those such professional exoner which we call which they called them, were responsible for more than half of the exonerations in twenty and seventeen, according to that report, and that's they also broke down a lot of those exonerations, so eighty of those exonerations were due to private organizations actually working to overturn wrongful convictions.

The years lost just last year was one four hundred and seventy eight years. On average, each defendant exonerated last year spent at least ten point six years behind bars, so that's adding up to almost one thy five hundred

years spent waiting just to be cleared. Specifically, looking at eggxzonerations caused by official misconduct, so that includes things like officers threatening witnesses, analysts falsifying tests, or officials withholding evidence that could have cleared the defendant those were eighty four, So eighty four exonerations were due to official misconduct and sixty six exonerations were due to no crime, So defendants who were wrongfully convicted in cases in which there was

no crime at all committed. So this included things like a dozen drug possession cases, eleven child sex abuse cases, and nine murder cases. So there's very interesting statistics there from the United States, particularly around the fact that half of those exonerations, those one hundred and thirty nine exonerations, were due to just dedicated people working specifically on wrongful convictions.

Midin when you hear stats like that, does that surprise you or what do you think when you when you actually hear those sort of reports and those sort of that sort of data.

Latinos who are overrepresented in prison. The second thing that's really troubling is that the work is not being done by law enforcement of any kind, not even internal affairs. That the majority of this is being done by concerned citizens groups, individual lawyers, but more so small organizations right around the country. And so what we're having to see is just as we're doing here, groups with very small amounts of resources going up against the state, and we

know just how it is to overturn a conviction. So for this many people to be exonerated again, we have to think how many people in the US are in prison who are innocent? And it goes to the point we've always made, which is this open question how many indigenous prisoners are innocent in Australia. And one thing I would say is Australians have a habit of looking at the US and we watch all their crime shows. We know about the overrepresentation of African Americans in US jails

and it is bad. In fact, African American males are five times more likely to be in prison than their white counterparts. In Australia, it's three times worse for Aboriginal men and women. For those under the age of eighteen, it's up twenty times worse than for African Americans. So if you think it's bad in the United States, we

know it's bad, and we're seeing these exonerations. We know the answer to this open question that we're asking, how many Indigenous prisoners are innocent, it's hundreds, if not thousands.

But we come back to if it's small community groups and individuals who are overturning these cases, it won't happen in Australia till the people doing the work get support and more people, particularly lawyers, step up and do the work that needs to be done to free the innocent people we have in our own prison system.

prison system. You look at juvenile justice in Western Australia, for example, where there was a period of time where there was one hundred people in juvenile detention and ninety eight of them were Indigenous, despite being only three percent of the population. When you have statistics that are that far out of balance, it's very likely for a large range of reasons why a far greater percentage of those young people are innocent, and of course their adult counterparts

are innocent. Partly that's to do with there is a greater process for appeal in the United States. There's been new legislation introduced in the US that we don't have in Australia for post conviction relief, particularly in states like Michigan where there was very high imprisonment rates. In fact, the death penalty in Michigan was apped by a Republican governor precisely because of the number of innocent people in

prison and on death row. So we also know that there's chronic underfunding of things like the Aboriginal Legal Service. There's a lack of translators, there's a lack of community support to go on with things like appeals. Aboriginal prisoners who are trying to appeal don't ever get to choose their own lawyer unless they have the funds too. This

is another enormous problem. If a lawyer has already failed you once at trial, and we know that's happened, the likelihood of them then successfully appealing your case is virtually zero. So I think even a conservative estimate in terms of Indigenous prisoners convicted of serious crimes, because we know the most scary thing about all of them is the worse the crime, the more likely it is the prison system

and the justice system gets it wrong. And this is from long term studies both in Australia and the United States. And I'd go back to Michigan again, where they had a between a one and two percent failure rate that's sending innocent people to prison across the general population on death row. When they analyzed every single case of current death row inmates at the time, the failure eight was

twenty five percent. Now that's one in four prisoners. So if we think of all the Indigenous men and women in maximum in maximum security prisons in Australia, it's very likely the figure could be that high.

What do we see in Kevin Henry's case that have enormous similarities to these exonerations and these statistics in the US.

that is that two post mortems were conducted. Now, this is highly unusual, and it's also unusual because there was never an inclination of any kind given to the defense attorneys that we're aware of that two were done. In fact, the findings of one seem to have been taken and then stored from after Kevin was arrested until we've uncovered

them very recently. One was conducted the day that Linda was found, on the Sunday, and the second one was conducted on the Monday, the following day after the first had been conducted. And they were done almost twenty four hours after each other. They were both done at about ten in the morning. Now, the problem with the two post mortems is that they detail very different things. One of the post mortems is largely what is included in the trial transcripts and was used at evidence in the

trial of Kevin Henry. But the second transcript of the post mortem that was carried out on the Monday contains things that were never included, and this includes something called what the state of hypostasis was at the time of death, and it was recorded as posterior. So to explain that very simply, that means that the person passed away, most likely when they were lying on their back, which was how we know Linda was during the attack that took

place on her. It's not what occurs when a body is placed in the river when the person is still alive. And for Kevin to have been found guilty of murder, Linda had to still be alive when she was placed in the river. So we know that that is not correct, and that's from this second post mortem. The other issue is that the examiner from the second post mortem clearly states that the body had already been tampered with or at least someone had done something in terms of cleaning

the body up. And we've discussed this briefly before, that Linda's body was covered in mud and that her body was cleaned before the post mortem the second one took place, and that should never have happened. We don't know what the chain of custody was, and we don't know who

had the responsibility to ensure no tampering took place. But what we do know is that only one name continues to come up was present when Linda's body was found and inspected by a doctor from the Rockampton Hospital, when the first post mortem was carried out, and when the second post mortem was carried out, and that was Detective

Senior Constable Robert Hunt. You'll know from this podcast he's also the person that charged Kevin Henry, who was present during Kevin Henry's interviews where there's the mysterious gaps in the tape, who Kevin Henry has previously alleged he was threatened during that interview, that Kevin Henry was also not given a lawyer, and that the situation around that is very suspect to say the least. And you will have

heard that. This is also the detective who, despite being quite junior ranks, turned up for just about every witness statement. This is also the detective who took witness statements from people when they were intoxicated, who took witness statements from people who were in prison, and of course we know about the veracity of witness statements given by jail house snitches. This is also the detective who took a witness statement from a miner who was intoxicated at the time without

a lawyer present. And this is the detective who on the stand was found in many cases simply not to have been telling the truth and had admitted very openly that they considered this an open and shutcase. It's no surprise that this is the same detective that was there from the very start, and it's clear from his statement to the court that he cherry picked the very best

of what would suit his case from the two post mortems. So, while we're not suggesting that the doctors in conducting this these two post mortems did anything wrong, it's very strange that two took place. It's strange that the findings are different, and it's quite worrying that some of the things that would have led to clear signs of Kevin Henry's innocence were deliberately left out.

first post mortem. Then we get confirmation the body had been cleaned by the second doctor who said that and I quote, I understand that when initially retrieved, the body had been covered with mud, but the body has since been cleaned. But there's nothing about why the body was cleaned, what evidence might have been removed when the body was cleaned, and who cleaned it and where, where, when and why?

And these are questions that we don't have answers to other than we know that this one detective was present for the examination of all three the two post mortems and the first examination by the doctor who was called down to the riverbank. So we have statements from eyewitnesses, from police and from three doctors, and they all contradict that of one officer.

this is what has held up parole for so long. Remember, Kevin Henry absolutely denies ever raping Linda, and even though we know there was a forensic report and the crime lab in Brisbane conducted a vast range of forensic tests at the time. We have the doctor's examination, and then we have two post mortems now from people who were qualified to carry out post mortems as coroners, and they were all consistent on one fact. Linda did not suffer rape.

There was no crime of rape. So Kevin Henry should never have been found guilty of that in the first place. The fact that that is what's holding up his parole to this day, more than two decades, nearly three decades later, is just what we see in these exoneraisations in the United States. We're talking about crimes that simply never took place.

So we have multiple doctors, pathologists, people with the expertise for the State of Queensland to entrust these people as coroners to determine how people died, often in very difficult circumstances to understand, and they all rea on one thing, and that is that Linda was not raped. Now, this is vital for two reasons, and I think it's absolutely disgusting that the police even took that charge to trial,

let alone that Kevin was convicted of it. First, it means that for all this time Linda's family has been led to believe she was sexually assaulted and have been forced to live with that memory for the rest of their lives. And it's something that simply did not take place. This was a crime committed by the police on Linda's family, an Aboriginal family already suffering greatly because of police action.

Doctors and coroners all state, in their official reports tended to the court that no crime of rape took place, and yet the police would take it to court and through what we've detailed in this podcast gain a disgusting

and wrongful conviction. Secondly, of course, it's meant that Kevin Henry has stayed in prison all this time because a parole board understandably does not want to release someone who's been convicted of rape if they believe that person has not gone through the proper processes in terms of rehabilitation. But what they've been told is the same lie that

the rape took place when it never did. And because of the ridiculous laws in the state of Queensland, the parole Board has not been able to consider the very evidence that should have been presented to court that was done by professional doctors and coroners at the time that this rape simply never took place. So it's not just a matter of the police fabricating evidence and stitching Kevin Henry up. It's also got to do with politicians not

passing the laws that make exonerations possible. It shouldn't be in twenty eighteen that we can hold in our hands official documents and post examination reports done by doctors and coroners that categorically states something did not happen, and nearly thirty years later a man is in prison for that crime. So if we are going to see any number of people released, as we're starting to see in the United States, we're going to need lawyers to start taking these cases up.

We're going to need politicians willing to change laws to allow the truth, the real evidence, to see the light of day. And we're going to need the public to support work of those trying to free the wrongfully convicted, because it can't be done without resources and a great deal of time. Just as we've seen in the United States, sadly in Australia only a handful of people are carrying

out this work. This podcast is one of those works, but it needs support or people like Kevin Henry and all those like him won't get justice, And the families of those like Linda whose life was tragically taken and then the police doubled down on that crime by completely lying to her family about what took place. Has continued for nearly three decades, and it's time that changes.