ANOTHER LEGAL COVERUP

A man wrongly convicted of killing his girlfriend says a ban on West Australian barristers talking to the media on the record could have meant his case may never have been resolved.

At a meeting of the WA Bar Association last night, the state's 165 barristers were told they were no longer able to talk to the media on the record without permission from the association president. They will still be allowed to brief journalists off the record to ensure accurate reporting. The Bar association's president, Ken Martin QC, said the decision was designed to prevent American-style media circuses developing in WA.

John Button, who served five-and-a-half years of a 10-year prison term after being wrongly convicted of running down his teenage girlfriend Rosemary Anderson in 1963, said the decision was another method for the legal fraternity to cover its mistakes. A court quashed Mr Button's conviction in 2002 after the author of a book unearthed evidence that another man, known serial killer Eric Cooke, had killed Ms Anderson.

Mr Button says it was the media who secured his release, by working alongside QC Tom Percy. "To say they are not allowed to talk ... to me, this is a gag, and another way of the system covering up its mistakes," Mr Button told ABC radio. "Rather than admit it and fix it, they would rather close all the gates to any sort of discussion - the last thing they want is for the public to know the whole truth. "I believe it was the media that secured my release ... Tom (Percy) did a fantastic job, but if the media had not come onside and worked alongside him, we would never have got there, purely because of the corruption in the system."

Mr Martin said recent examples had prompted the changes to the rules - but he did not say what they were. "Regrettably, there is an American tendency creeping into WA and Australia to try and have OJ Simpson circus-like side trials before the media," he told ABC radio. "That is a bad thing and we want to try and stop that. "I am not going to go into specific cases, but I think we all know situations where people start talking about the merits and demerits of their case publicly before their case has even been tried."

Last night's changes are understood to have been prompted by comments made by Perth lawyer Mark Trowell after he was asked to become involved in the case of Schapelle Corby, convicted in Bali for drug smuggling. After Mr Trowell was reported as saying Corby's Indonesian legal team intended to bribe appeal judges in Denpasar, senior WA silk Wayne Martin complained about him to the bar association.

Report here


Background on the Button case:

Somewhere in the world there's always an expert on any subject, no matter how arcane," says Bret Christian. In 1999, Christian, the publisher of independent suburban newspapers around Perth, Australia, needed to shed light on a murder that had taken place on February 9, 1963. The murder weapon was either a 1962 Simca Aronde, a homely French car with the rounded look of the early '50s that in its time and place was considered sporty for its 1500cc engine, or a 1961 Holden, an Australian GM car.

On the evening of the murder—John Button's 19th birthday—Button's girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, had stomped out of the house after an argument and was headed home. She walked from Redfern Street, the Buttons' leafy lane of working-class cottages, to the busier Nicholson Road, which ran under a railway embankment. Button followed in the Simca, stopping several times to beg forgiveness. At length, he broke for a smoke at a gas station and watched Rosemary disappear under the embankment. From there, she turned onto Stubbs Terrace, then a poorly lit haven for auto-body shops. When Button resumed his pursuit, he soon found her unconscious along Stubbs Terrace. He took her to a nearby doctor, who called an ambulance.

The police suspected Button, because of the argument and a damaged grille on the Simca that he attributed to an earlier fender-bender. They interrogated him, and punched him up a bit, says Button, and then wrote a confession, which Button signed. Button served five years' hard labor for manslaughter.

Unknown to Button until after his trial, another man, Eric Edgar Cooke, had confessed to the same murder. Cooke was a serial killer who had terrorized Perth since 1958. His 20 murders and assaults on young women included six hit-and-runs. After he was nabbed for a shooting, in August 1963, Cooke, a small man with a harelip and cleft palate, whose father had beaten him with the regularity of sunrise, confessed the rest. The police, heretofore stymied, embraced the confessions, except regarding Anderson and another murder where conviction had been achieved. (The Kennedy assassination, which had occurred two days earlier, pushed Cooke's trial off the front pages, says Christian.) But the Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed the two men's subsequent appeals.

His sentence served, Button worked desperately to prove his innocence. A break came in 1991, when his brother met a journalist, Estelle Blackburn, at a dance. Blackburn poured her life into Button's case, spending six years writing a book, Broken Lives. She dug up "fresh evidence" that enabled reopening the case under Australian law: a Vespa rider who claimed Cooke had chased him, and a man who had seen Button place the unconscious Anderson in his car, but who was not called as a witness at the trial. Christian published Blackburn's book in 1998 but worried that it lacked "the killer piece of evidence she needed [for Button] to win in court." These witnesses' stories were vague, and Christian feared presciently that the prosecutor would "tear them apart."

One day, examining a photo of an Australian Chrysler Cooke had used to run down two girls, Christian was struck by the damage, which was far greater than that on Button's car-and these girls had survived. That dialectic led Christian to seek an expert on car-and-pedestrian crashes.

All leads led to William Russell "Rusty" Haight, who is 45 and lives in San Diego with his wife, Catherine, a fitness trainer, his children, and 10-year-old son Connor's pet snakes, which he tolerates out of paternal love. But he works all over the country, at hotels-such as the Clarion Resort Fontainebleau in Ocean City, Maryland, where groups such as the Maryland Association of Traffic Accident Investigators hold conferences-as well as on large expanses of nearby tarmac.

Haight, who was three when Anderson was killed, is an expert in vehicle accident reconstruction. That art is the bastard child of engineering principles and methods of police investigation and analysis, he says. It's not about putting Humpty Dumpty back together, but rather, understanding exactly how he came apart.

Haight is renowned for being his own crash-test dummy. He holds a Guinness World Record for the most car crashes, now approaching 800. The crashes have involved speeds up to 53 mph, but his most serious injury was a minor cut caused by an airbag. He also ranks 24th on Men's Journal's list of the 25 toughest men in America, behind 50 Cent, but ahead of Hillary Clinton. No kidding....

The crash testing went like clockwork. One by one, Rusty drove the Simcas into the dummy, dubbed Matilda, at speeds ranging from 27 to 39 mph. Each time, Matilda slammed the hood before cartwheeling above the roof, leaving the classic pedestrian-crash-damage pattern that was absent from Button's Simca....

News accounts drew two more witnesses out of the woodwork, whose testimony would bolster the case, most notably, Trevor Condren, the police crash examiner who had inspected the Simca following the murder and had said at the time that it could not have killed Anderson. He had been prevented from testifying at the original trial. Now, in court, Condren identified the Simca in a photo, noting that there had been no blood, fabric, or skin on it.

In court, Christian says, "Rusty was so good at his work that while he was giving this incredibly detailed scientific evidence he was chatting up the girl who was running the tapes for the court transcript." Rusty played a major role in Button's exoneration. The Supreme Court summary credits the crash tests for raising doubts that Button's Simca hit Anderson, and for corroborating Cooke's account from Button's 1964 appeal. After Button's lawyer read Eric Cooke's 1964 affidavit describing how he ran down Anderson, the video of Rusty driving the Holden into the dummy eerily echoed Cooke's account.

On the last day of the appeal, in his summary, the Crown prosecutor stuck to the original story that Rosemary Anderson had been carried for some distance on the front of the car. But the judges began quoting Rusty's evidence to the contrary. It then dawned on Button's supporters that they had won the case.

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