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PEOPLE IN JEOPARDY

The Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, is urging a national law reform to get rid of a centuries-old law concerning double jeopardy.

Simply the law means you can’t be tried twice for the same crime –even if damning new evidence comes to light.

This may sound ludicrous but imagine if somebody came forward with video footage of O.J. Simpson actually stabbing his ex-wife to death he could not be charged.

Or if Azaria Chamberlain’s body was found in a trunk in Lindy’s attic the same double jeopardy protection would apply.

Once tried and acquitted for a crime you cannot be re-tried. And some people argue that is how it should be. But in these days of DNA tests old crimes are being solved.

Double jeopardy is in the news for two different reasons today. That convicted child rapist Clint Rex Betteridge can’t be tried in Australia for sex offences in Cambodia because he’s already been tried and convicted in absentia over there.

And then there’s the case of Raymond John Carroll who was convicted of the rape and murder of a little girl thirty years ago but was acquitted on appeal. He was then convicted of perjury but the High Court freed him on the grounds of Double Jeopardy.

A woman has now come forward and claims that she saw Carroll near 17-month-old Deidre Kennedy’s home on the night of the abduction and murder.

Carroll has always claimed he was in South Australia on an RAAF training course that night when Deidre Kennedy was murdered and her body thrown on top of a toilet block in Ipswich Queensland.

Nothing can be done about the damning evidence because of Double Jeopardy.

Monday, February 10, 2003

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002