Australia: A rather strange false confession

A man who confessed to a robbery he thought he'd committed will create Australian criminal history when his conviction is quashed for an offence even the crown is certain he didn't commit. In a bizarre set of circumstances two men have served jail sentences for the robbery of a newsagency, in the Brisbane suburb of Camp Hill, which was definitely committed by just one offender.

In District Court in 2001, Lee William Carkeet pleaded guilty to the Camp Hill robbery and three others committed in Brisbane's southern suburbs in 2000. He had no recollection of the Camp Hill offence because he had been intoxicated at the time of the robberies, but had pleaded guilty to that and three other robberies he was responsible for. He was serving his jail sentence when another man Damien Paul Godwin was linked to the robbery by fingerprints found at the scene. Godwin later faced a Brisbane court and was also jailed for the Camp Hill robbery but Carkeet remained convicted of the same offence.

Carkeet's lawyers went to the Court of Appeal today to have the conviction for the Camp Hill robbery quashed. Barrister Simon Hamlyn-Harris, for Carkeet, said his client still had to serve his sentence for the other three robberies, which Carkeet admitted, but he was entitled to have the fourth conviction set aside. He said it was Carkeet's right to have a correct criminal record.

Mr Hamlyn-Harris said research in Australia had shown there were no other similar cases although there had been one in England in 1985. He added in America there were cases of mentally weak people pleading guilty to murder, perhaps to avoid the death penalty, only for it to be later found they were innocent.

Crown Prosecutor Todd Fuller said the prosecution conceded there was no doubt Carkeet was innocent of the Camp Hill offence. He said the crown could not oppose the quashing of that conviction and Carkeet had pleaded guilty in the first place but he had little recollection of committing most of the robberies. The Court of Appeal reserved its judgment so it could compile written reasons.

Original report here.




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