Pentland not guilty
THE son of Neil Pentland who was on Tuesday acquitted of the 1997 murder of his business partner Philip Carlyle has lambasted police investigators and prosecutors, saying the case against his father had been “riddled with ineptitude compounded by mismanagement”.
Outside court, Mr Pentland’s son Adam Pentland thanked his father’s legal team.
“Without their tireless efforts and immaculate attention to detail, my father’s life would basically be over,” he said.
Mr Carlyle, 48, was shot four times at point-blank range on April 13, 1997 in a soundproof plant room at the offices of Gold Coast IT start-up Atnet, where he worked.
After a two-week Judge alone trial in the Supreme Court, Justice Glenn Martin found Mr Pentland not guilty of the single charge of murder.
“Many negligent mistakes and failures have been made by investigators,” Adam Pentland told media outside court. “These include not collecting crucial evidence, losing evidence, withholding evidence, failing to properly analyse evidence, ignoring witnesses and even ignoring the evidence of the police’s own forensic expert.
“All lines of inquiry that did not support the case against my father were abandoned and ignored. Because of these gross errors the murderer is extremely unlikely to be held accountable.”
Prosecutors had alleged that Pentland, now 72, fired four bullets into the 48-year-old father’s head in a “methodical execution”.
Pentland’s barrister Saul Holt QC argued the circumstantial case against his client was weak.
In his reasons for judgment, Justice Martin said he did not accept the prosecution evidence that the relationship between the two men had deteriorated “to an extent sufficient to provide motive”.
“The material suggests that they had a number of disagreements about various aspects of the way in which Atnet should proceed with its projects, especially Insure-IT,” he wrote in his findings. “But those disagreements were nothing more than one might expect from persons engaged in an enterprise with considerable pressure upon them, and in which each saw the prospect of considerable success.
“The exchanges between them, when they became heated, were conducted by email and usually concluded by each party accepting that the other had been genuine and only sought success for the business.”
“The prosecution has not demonstrated to the required standard all the elements necessary to constitute the offence of murder,” he found.