From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Kristinamiot. It's Tuesday, June tenth, twenty twenty five. Newly minted Opposition Energy and Admissions Production spokesman Dantien says he'll take his time on the fate of the coalition's contentious net zero target.
He says there'll be a conversation.
About nuclear two, but any future models won't replicate the one proposed by Ouster Liberal leader Peter Dutton. Criminal cases involving Aboriginal people could be heard in closed court or by female judicial officers. Those are the new guidelines given to judges in a revised New South Wales bench book. That exclusive story is live right now at the Australian dot com dot au. Chris Dawson has launched a last ditch bid to have his conviction for the nineteen eighty
two murder of his wife quashed. The High Court of Australia will this week consider an application made by the former rugby league star for special leave to appeal of finding that upheld the conviction.
That's today's episode, Christopher Michael Dawson on the charge that don are about eight January nineteen eighty two, at Dayview or elsewhere in the state of New South Wales.
You did murder Lynette Dawson. I find you guilty. All the message down.
This was a moment more than forty years in the making. On a bright winter's day in twenty twenty two, New South Wales Supreme Court Justice Ian Harrison found Chris Dawson guilty of the murder of his first wife, Lynette Simms, who vanished from their home at Bayview in the early nineteen eighties. She was thirty three years old, a doting mum to two little girls, and a dedicated employee at
a childcare center on Sydney's Northern Beaches. Her fate was unknown for decades until the Australians podcast The Teacher's Pet, created by National Chief correspondent Hedley Thomas, exposed Lynnette's husband, Chris Dawson, as a murderer. He's always maintained he played no role in Lynette's disappearance, and claims she left the family, her daughters, her husband and the home she loved of
her own accord. The story captured national and international attention, and in late twenty eighteen, within months of the podcast release, police arrested and charged Chris Dawson with Lynette's murder.
The key thing to come out of this divena is that the police are now confident of a prosecution. Remember, a coroner twice has recommended charges in this case and the DPP in the eighties said no. But now they believe they have enough evidence.
More than three years after his arrest, Justice Ian Harrison would find Chris Dawson murdered Lynette to replace her with a teenage babysitter who'd become his second wife. Dawson was sentenced by Justice Harrison to twenty four years in prison with a non parole period of eighteen years.
I recognize that the unavoidable prospect is that mister Dawson will probably die in jail.
Mister Dawson, would you please stand.
The new South Wales government introduced nobody no parole legislation known as Lynn's Law in the months following Chris Dawson's conviction, that means he won't be eligible for parole unless he reveals the location of Lynette's remains to the authorities. In twenty twenty four, Chris Dawson launched a bid to quash his murder conviction in the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeals, arguing he suffered a forensic disadvantage in improving his innocence due to the long delay in bringing the
case to trial. He also argued there'd been a miscarriage of justice due to Justice Harrison's reliance upon lies allegedly told by Chris Dawson following Lynd's murder as evidence of a consciousness of guilt, and that the verdict was unreasonable because the Crown's case was wholly circumstantial and a hypothesis consistent with Dawson's innocence wasn't excluded beyond a reasonable doubt.
Chris Dawson's barrister in the appeal, Belinda Rigg SC, told the court transactions were made on Lynette's bank card in the weeks following her disappearance, and that she'd called the kiosk at the Northbridge Baths, where he worked part time as a lifeguard, to let him know she needed some time to herself, but the proof had been lost to time.
The three judge panel of Justices Julie Ward, Christine Adamson and Anthony Payne unanimously dismissed the appeal, writing that Justice Harrison's reasoning was sound, that the Crown's circumstantial case was compelling, and that Chris Dawson failed to establish that the forty year delay in bringing charges had caused him a forensic disadvantage. A voice actor is reading part of the Justice's reasons.
First, given the applicants different versions of events, it was unclear whether the unavailability of certain bank card statements was relevant, and in any case, it was his own failure to retain those statements, not any delay that caused them to be unavailable. Secondly, the lack of records showing the applicant was working at the north Bridge Barths on nine January nineteen eighty two caused no disadvantage, since the Crown conceded
the applicant was working there on that day. Thirdly, records of phone calls made to the north Bridge Baths on nine February nineteen eighty two were unavailable because of limited technology at the time, not because of delay, and records of phone calls to the applicants house would not have assisted the applace.
Now, Chris Dawson is taking the fight to the nation's highest court in a last ditch effort. To have his murder conviction quashed. For two weeks every month, the High Court of Australia sits in Canberra to consider a whole range of civil and criminal matters. Chris Dawson has applied for special leave to appeal his murder conviction. That means he's asking the High Court to grant him an appeal hearing.
If that application is granted on Thursday, he'll ask the court to quash the twenty twenty two murder conviction made by Justice Harrison and grant him a new trial.
Well, I think this is Chris Dawson's final role of the dice in so far as his attempt to beat the murder conviction of twenty twenty two Guys.
Headley Thomas is the Australian's National Chief correspondent and the creator of the Teacher's Pet podcast.
Now he's seeking leave from the High Court to run similar arguments that his conviction should be quashed, and much of his argument turns on his claim that he had a significant forensic disadvantage because of the age of the case and the failure in his view of the police at certain stages.
A voice actor is reading part of the grounds of the former school teacher's High Court application.
The Court of Criminal Appeal irred by failing to find that the applicants trial miscarried because the trial judge failed to find that the applicants suffered a significant forensic disadvantage.
The Court of Criminal Appeal.
Irred by failing to take the applicants significant forensic disadvantage into account when considering whether the verdict was unreasonable and unable to be supported by the evidence.
Chris Dawson says significant witnesses, namely Sue Butlin, who purportedly saw Lyn Dawson getting into a car at a fruit shop on the New South Wales Central Coast, had died by the time the case was tried by Justice Harrison alone in twenty twenty two, and that important documents from the abandoned initial homicide investigation had been lost.
We have in.
Sue Butlin, the wife of a guy called Ray Butlin. Ray Butlin was a rugby league coach on the Central Coast and he got to know and coach the Dawson twins, Christ and Paul after they'd finished their professional careers with the Newtown Jets. The version that we have from either Chris Dawson or Ray Butlin, is that Sue Butlin saw a woman she believed was Lynn Simms in a vehicle at a fruit barn on the Central Coast shortly after the Crown says Chris Dawson murdered Lynn in the home
at Bayview on the Northern Beaches. Now, we don't have any direct evidence from Sue Butlin about that. What we do know because Ray Butlin disclosed this in the inquest where he was questioned about his wife's purported sighting of Lynn, and Ray Butlin said of his own wife, who had been dead for some years, that she did have a tendency to exaggerate things and she might.
Have embellished the story.
However, he felt sure that if she were on the stand, she would say, yeah, I saw Lynn. Now, the problem here is that the police investigation in the early nineties stopped as a result of Chris Dawson telling homicide detectives that his mate's wife saw Lynn. But there's no no evidence of any attempt by those homicide detectives to try to corroborate Chris's claims that his mate's wife saw Lynn.
So the police didn't go directly to Sue Butler, who was still alive in nineteen ninety two, to take any kind of statement from her.
So there's nothing in writing.
There's just this hearsay account, and this is being held up as one of the pieces of evidence that was crucial to Chris Dawson's defense and should have been obtained. And I think that many people who have followed this case close he would think that, yes, the police should have got a statement, but that the police failures in this case early on cut both ways.
It is strongly arguable.
In my view that if police had done a much better job in the early stages after Lynn's disappearedearrance, then Chris Dawson would have been prosecuted and convicted of murder very early on. So it doesn't necessarily follow that he has been denied justice. It may be that he's actually experienced freedom because of the police failures and the delays in doing things.
The application argues there's no onus on Chris Dawson to establish the delay certainly caused him a significant forensic disadvantage, only that there's a real possibility that it did.
It is unnecessary that each individual lost witness or document singly would have demonstrated innocence, but rather that collectively for lost evidence would have likely strengthened the applicant's position at trial.
John Paul Cashen is a partner at law firm Thompson Gear, which advises the Australian.
It's an interesting one because in Australia we don't have a statute of limitations. Here someone's committed murder or any serious efets, really we can bring a charge against them ten, twenty, thirty, forty fifty years after the fact, and I think courts are reluctant to say that the mere fact that there's a delay means that someone can't be brought to justice.
And what happened was in the late nineteen eighties there was a case called Longman where the charges has been brought about twenty years after the alleged defending and in that case the court warned the jury that there was a real risk that the evidence was unreliable and that
led to an acquittal. And there was a feeling after that case that it shifted the boundary too much in the favor of acquittals, and so they changed the law to bring it back a little more in favor of the policy of well, just because there's a delay doesn't mean you can't face trial. And that's what this appeal
is really all about. In this case, there's no doubt that Dawson has suffered some prejudice because of certain evidence going missing, and so he said, well, he was never able to truly test that, and the Court of Appeal ultimately has to draw a line and say, well, did you suffer a significant forensic disadvantage because of these things? And the Court of Appeal said no, it was just speculative that these things would have helped him. There wasn't
an actual prejudice, and he's upset about that. He says, now, no, that puts the test too high, that shifts the burden too far in favor of conviction, and that's really the essence of this appeal before the High Court. Now where do we draw that line?
Chris Dawson also says the Court of Criminal Appeal got it wrong when it upheld Justice Harrison's reliance on lies allegedly told by him as evidence of consciousness of guilt because he had other reasons to lie.
One of the key parts of the first appeal was that Justice Harrison had incorrectly looked at the lies told by Chris Dawson. So one of the key ways a person gets convicted is when they led to police, and those lies are evidence of what we call consciousness of guilt. And sometimes a lie will be strong consciousness of guilt,
but sometimes people lie for other reasons. And indeed, in Dawson's case, there was a suggestion that he might have been lying about certain things, not because he'd killed Lynette, but because he was embarrassed or trying to hide the fact that he was having a relationship with his former student.
And the Court of Appeal found that Justice Harrison didn't deal with those lies and that consciousness of guilt appropriately, So they did find that he'd made an error in relation to those questions, but they have a broad discretion to say, well, even if the trial judge made an error, we're not going to overturn his decision unless we find that a substantial miscarriage of justice occurred, and in this particular case, they found that there wasn't a substantial miscarriage
of justice. So that will also form part of the High Court judgment. And it sort of rolls into that same question about well, what is the total cumulative amount of prejudice suffered by the accused in this case? Is it enough to overturn his conviction?
Coming up?
Why this isn't Chris Dawson's first High Court rodeo. This isn't the first time Chris Dawson has made an application to the High Court after his arrest. Applications for a permanent stay of proceedings were dismissed by Justice Elizabeth Fulton in the Supreme Court of New South Wales and later by the Court of Criminal Appeal. Here's Headley Thomas.
Well before the murder trial in twenty twenty two, Chris Dawson was determined to try to avoid trial altogether, and he wanted to persuade the courts that he could not get a fair trial as a result of failures of police to find evidence that he says, would have been in his favor that would have shown in his claims that his wife Lynn had not been murdered, that in fact,
she had probably started a new life. And secondly, he claimed that he couldn't get a fair trial because too many people had listened to or heard about the Teacher's pet and had a fixed view of his guilt. Now he failed in those attempts to get a permanent stay of proceedings and his final bid was to the High Court and that was denied shortly before the murder trial
in twenty twenty two. When Chris Dawson was trying to avoid trial altogether, he relied on a leading criminal defense lawyer, Phillip Bolton, and then for the criminal trial, Philip Bolton was not in that. In fact, that was run for christ Dawson by a defense lawyer called Pauline David, and she.
Had known Dawson many years earlier.
In fact, when Chris Dawson was interviewed by homicide detectives in nineteen ninety two on the Gold Coast and much younger, Pauline David was Chris Dawson's solicitor during that interview. Then we go forward thirty years. Philip Bolton didn't get involved in the murder trial to our knowledge. However, Pauline David at the end of the trial was appointed to the
District Court of New South Wales as a judge. So Philip Bolton has returned and he's running this appeal to the High Court, and in documents that have been filed he has highlighted what he says were numerous errors by the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal in its findings, which said that Chris Dawson should not succeed with his bid for freedom.
Headley Thomas is The Australian's national Chief correspondent. You can listen to the Teacher's pet and access the nation's best journalism anytime at the Australian dot com dot au