Page 5346 - Week 17 - Tuesday, 3 December 1991
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MRS GRASSBY (11.05): The Labor Party's policy is a social policy. Our policy is that it is more acceptable that a guilty man go free than that we lock up an innocent man. I believe firmly in this policy because, over the years - Mr Collaery has mentioned many of those cases - innocent people have been sent to gaol for something they did not do. When you have a majority jury, this can easily happen. A man or a woman who has not committed the offence can, because of certain evidence and trial by the media, which we all know very well, be locked up for a year or 10 or 20 years. Mr Collaery commented on this. We all know that this happened to the Birmingham Six. Half their life was destroyed. This happened on evidence found out later not to be true.
A case comes to my mind. When I was a child my father told the story of a man who had been charged with committing a murder in New South Wales. It was the time when we hanged people; we had capital punishment, which is quite frightening. At the time of the murder in Sydney the man was in a town called Narrandera. On the day of the murder he had been buying meat in a particular butcher shop in Narrandera that belonged to my father's best friend.
The point is that two people on the jury found him not guilty, and eight people found him guilty. Luckily for this man, it was a hung jury. My father's friend, who one day was wrapping up some meat - in those days meat was wrapped in white paper and then wrapped in newspaper - noticed this report of this particular trial in a very old newspaper. He remembered the man by his photograph and remembered that on that particular day he was in his shop buying meat. If the man had been found guilty, he would have been hanged. You cannot give a person back their life. The fact that the man went free is very important.
With a majority jury, goodness knows what could happen. We do not have capital punishment in this country, thank goodness. I hope that I never live to see the day that capital punishment comes in. If it does and if we have majority juries, many people may go to the gallows, or the gas chamber, or whatever way they chose, for something they did not do. Therefore I, with Mr Collaery, could not support the chairman on majority juries.
In respect of paragraph 5.8(b) on page 14, there has been a misunderstanding. Both Mr Collaery and I voted very strongly against this. Mr Stefaniak believed in it and he was the chairman of the committee. We said that he could agree with what he liked, but that we would vote firmly against this. I believe that we did the right thing. I do not want to take up a lot of the time of the house. In social justice, we could not believe in majority juries, and if a vote were taken on it in this house I think others would agree.
Debate (on motion by Mr Connolly) adjourned.
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