The interviews in Witness trace fascinating shifts in professional culture. She accepts counsel’s obligation to strongly defend their client, but focuses on the professional ethic of choice in how this is achieved.Ĭrucially, Witness emphasises that many defence counsel do treat complainants with dignity and respect, and still defend their client admirably.īut at the book’s core is a justified sense of outrage at those who choose to treat complainants and witnesses with a hostility causing its own trauma a special kind of systemic abuse. Neither she, nor her interviewees object to principles of presumed innocence until proven guilty, or the standard of proof. Pell decision: why sexual offence trials often result in acquittal, even with credible witnesses This systemic environment is overlaid by features of sexual assault trials, which often turn on the complainant’s credibility and word against that of the accused. Our system enables prosecution by the state: the complainant is simply a witness, subject to rules of evidence and procedure.Ĭore doctrines protecting the accused exist to prevent state abuse of power. Milligan recognises this experience is only partly due to the adversarial criminal justice system being centred neither on the complainant, nor on truth. Through multiple case studies of cross-examination, centring mostly on cases in Victoria and NSW, Milligan demonstrates the best known dimension of this brutality, laying bare the chasm between complainants’ expectations of the system, and the reality of its operation.Ĭomplainants, she shows, are stunned to realise the trial process is not about establishing truth. Witness recognises that for many complainants, their experience of the criminal justice system is traumatic. Media Files: Investigative reporter Louise Milligan on Cardinal Pell and redactions in the Royal Commission's report Her visceral description of the attempted destruction of her own character and credibility in cross-examination testifies to the brutality of many witnesses’ encounters with the criminal trial process. “You vomit … Your mind spins … You cry …” “You don’t sleep the night before that first day in court …” she writes. Here Milligan displays courage in divulging the personal toll taken. Witness is informed, too, by Milligan’s own experience of being cross-examined as a witness in the 2018 committal hearing of Cardinal George Pell. NSW now has a chance to get it rightĪlso examined in detail is the case of former St Kevin’s student Paris Street, who allowed Milligan to reproduce a letter he wrote about his experience of being cross-examined at the age of 15. She is now working with criminologists and advocates to develop minimum standards in rape laws to better define consent.Īustralian law doesn't go far enough to legislate affirmative consent. Her experience influenced a Law Reform Commission inquiry into the law of consent. These include Saxon Mullins, a young woman who was the complainant in a rape case that involved two trials, two appeals, and judicial errors. The book is further inspired by detailed consideration of the experience of complainants in two high-profile cases, which Milligan had previously covered in Sydney and Melbourne.
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