Victorian court quashes Katia Pyliotis's murder conviction after judge's 'boring' lawyer comment
A woman has had her murder conviction quashed after arguing she was denied a fair trial by a judge who labelled her lawyer’s questions “boring”.
At the December 2018 trial Justice Paul Coghlan also called Katia Pyliotis’s murder defence a “red herring calculated to mislead” and told lawyers that was what he would tell the jury.
Pyliotis was jailed for 19 years last year for the murder of Elia Abdelmessih, whose bludgeoned body was found alongside a tin of mangoes and a Virgin Mary statue in 2005.
Victoria’s court of appeal overturned the conviction on Wednesday and the three judges ruled it would be a matter for the director of public prosecutions whether she faced another trial. Pyliotis faced three failed trials before being convicted in the fourth.
Her barrister, Dermot Dann QC, said the court should overturn the conviction because of Coghlan’s “negative and scathing assessment” of the defence case.
At one point while the trial lawyer Richard Edney was questioning a witness, Coghlan interjected to tell him “this is even more boring than the other parts of your cross-examination”.
Three appeal judges found those comments and others may have unfavourably influenced the jury’s consideration of the defence case, which involved a confession to police by another woman who has since died.
“To describe counsel’s cross-examination as ‘boring’ ... had the tendency to demean counsel’s competence and to run the risk of diminishing his standing in the eyes of the jury,” the judges said.
“Comments such as these – if they are ever justified – should be reserved for occasions when the jury is absent.”
But the judges ruled that while the boring comment did not cause a miscarriage of justice, four other comments about the defence case did.
The defence had argued prosecutors could not rule out another woman, Susan Reddie, had killed Abdelmessih.
She confessed to murder, but a policeman gave evidence she had recanted to him days later.
Only one of the officer’s colleagues had a vague recollection of the recanting of the confession and the police diaries the officer said he recorded it in were lost.
No DNA matching Reddie, who died in 2012, was found at the crime scene, but DNA belonging to Pyliotis was found.
Coghlan told the jury that if there was an alternative suspect, or anyone else in the house, they didn’t leave DNA or fingerprints.
“Well whoever that someone else is, it would not seem possible that it was Susan Reddie,” he said.
Coghlan also said the evidence about Reddie recanting her confession was “a distraction”.
“I think it’s all a big red herring ... I make it clear to you that’s exactly what I’m going to tell this jury when the moment comes, that it’s a giant red herring,” he said.
But the appeal judges said whether or not Reddie had recanted was manifestly important.
Prosecutors had also appealed against the sentence, urging the appeal court to increase her time behind bars.