Crooked Australian cops still being believed

A NSW Supreme Court judge has just set a dubious precedent - by citing the disgraced former police officer Roger Rogerson on the practical difficulties of "loading up" [framing] a suspect with incriminating evidence such as guns and explosives.

Acting Justice Graham Barr accepts Rogerson's argument why it would have been difficult during the 1979 raids that led to six Croatian-Australian tradesmen being jailed for 15 years for terrorism.

In the NSW legal establishment's latest review of the "Croatian Six" case, Barr joins a long line of judges and state legal counsel who refuse to doubt evidence from Rogerson and colleagues that they found explosives in the homes of the accused, that each then volunteered confessions at the Criminal Investigation Bureau office, in the absence of lawyers or signatures.

Another pillar of the case is already demolished - testimony by an alleged seventh conspirator, Vico Virkez, who became the chief crown witness. In 1991, Chris Masters of ABC-TV's Four Corners program had Virkez, by then back in a Serbian region of Yugoslavia, admit on camera he'd set up the Croatian Six in cahoots with Yugoslav officials.

By then Rogerson, who had led one of the Sydney raids and arrested three of the six, was dismissed from the force and facing jail.

The NSW legal establishment was not moved. An application for judicial review was refused by the state government in 1994, based on a still "privileged" opinion by the then Crown advocate Rod Howie, QC (later a Supreme Court judge).

The 1996 Wood royal commission, which found "systemic" corruption in the NSW Police and led to disbandment of the squads involved in the Croatian Six raids, came too late to influence this review. But now Barr says it warrants no retrospective scepticism anyway.

The latest application for judicial review came after a reinvestigation by the Herald, published as the e-book Framed a year ago. NSW Chief Justice Tom Bathurst appointed Barr to advise whether a review was warranted.

The Herald's main new material included a statement made by a former senior legal officer in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Ian Cunliffe, that intelligence material which would have led to "not guilty" verdicts had been withheld by Canberra officials in a virtual "conspiracy to pervert the course of justice".

In addition, an American expert on the Balkans and its intelligence circles, Professor John Schindler, of the US Naval War College, said the former Yugoslav intelligence agency UDBa regarded the Croatian Six case as its most successful-ever operation to discredit ethnic separatists.

Barr made no further inquiry of Cunliffe or Schindler. He says Cunliffe must be pointing to knowledge about Virkez and his Yugoslav intelligence link, but declares that even if Virkez is discredited, the convictions stand on the police evidence. Schindler's finding about UDBa operations are dismissed, unless his informants were willing to be questioned.

Yet elsewhere Barr notes that: "It is clear that the part played by Virkez was greater than he said at trial. Whatever he did he did as a spy. That gave him the motive to lie about the part played by each applicant." And also that: "The Court of Criminal Appeal thought it unlikely the jury would have convicted had they thought Virkez to be a Yugoslav agent or anything of that sort."

Like the appeal court in 1982, Barr thus comes back to the police evidence. But he sees only the same partial view as did the jury, complaining that the transcripts of the trial and arguments over admissibility of evidence are "presumably now lost". They are not. The Supreme Court registry can get them out for him, and they are illuminating.

The jury was not told that evidence of the brutal bashing of the accused Vic Brajkovic, provided by medical staff at Long Bay Jail, made his verbal "confession" at the CIB inadmissible. Yet the same detectives were allowed to testify they'd found bomb materials at Brajkovic's house and that he'd confessed there: "I make bombs" - without defence lawyers being able to ask why they had lied about the later interview.

The defence couldn't raise the matter of a seventh young Croatian, Joseph Stipic, arrested the same night as the others in a fourth Sydney raid. A half-dozen police attested in the Central Magistrates Court they'd found detonators in his desk drawer. His lawyer, Jim McInerny, was able to show that Stipic had no desk and no drawer. The charges were dismissed.

Thus in two of the four raids in Sydney that night, led by members of squads later disbanded as hot spots of the systemic corruption found by Justice James Wood, groups of police were shown to have given identical incorrect evidence, and in one case brutalised the suspect. One of the other raids was led by Rogerson.

Barr finds support in remarks by Rogerson to the Herald, that it would have been hard to plant or fabricate evidence in raiding parties made up of officers from different squads who did not know and trust each other well. "Notwithstanding the participation of some officers impeached on other occasions, it seems reasonable to conclude that there was not the necessary absence of officers not known to be corrupt and co-operative . . . These considerations support the most recent statement of Mr Rogerson," Barr said.

Although Barr has acted as a court, his decision remains technically an administrative one, not subject to legal appeal. Any further avenue of review would have to be political. For a start, the federal Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, or ASIO's chief, David Irvine, could initiate an inquiry into Cunliffe's allegations.

Original report here




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