Body cam ‘can save us’
Push to make usage mandatory
LEADING legal minds have called for sweeping changes to the police body-worn camera policy, saying that mandatory use of the technology would prevent innocent people going to jail.
The new director of Griffith University’s Innocence Project, Robyn Blewer, and Southport-based criminal lawyer Ron Behlau have written an academic paper arguing for a nationwide mandate for police to wear and operate the recording devices when dealing with vulnerable witnesses, as well as accused people.
The Innocence Project, founded in 2001, works with Griffith students, pro bono lawyers and academics to investigate cases in which a person claims they have been wrongly convicted.
“One of the causes of wrongful convictions in Australia is the tainting of witness evidence by police, in particular, the evidence of vulnerable witnesses,” Mr Behlau said.
He cited the recent $30m payout and apology to Palm
Island residents by the Queensland Police Service, where the court found officers had engaged in racial discrimination in relation to the investigation into the 2004 death of Mulrunji Doomadgee and had mishandled their response to the riots by Palm Islanders that followed.
Mr Behlau said the class action demonstrated that written statements for vulnerable witnesses, including Indigenous people, do not always reflect their true recollection of events or cultural nuances in communication.
The push for change comes after the Queensland Coroners Court heard during an inquest this year into the fatal police shooting of Gold Coast Comanchero bikie associate Liam Scorsese that one of the officers involved failed to activate his bodyworn camera.
Dr Blewer said another barrier to investigating wrongful convictions was exhibits from original investigations no longer being in existence.
She said the Innocence Project was pushing for legislative reform to ensure evi
dence was preserved after court proceedings were finalised.
“Our projects look at law reform in that area because often evidence is destroyed or lost or returned or whatever it might be and we can’t do anything (to retest it),” the Griffith University Law School lecturer said.
“In the US, for example, they are much more open to the idea and they have preservation-of-evidence legislation, which makes it more streamlined and there are tighter rules for this reason — to establish innocence or error in the process.”
The Innocence Project has previously applied to the state’s Attorney-General to retest DNA evidence or reexamine expert testimony to see if it could support a person’s claim of innocence.
“I don’t think any of us would dispute that our system is a good one, and by and large for the vast majority of cases it gets it right, but … any mature, rational, reasonable system should be capable of acknowledging when it stuffs up and correcting those sort of errors,” Dr Blewer said.