$600,000 PAYOUT TO BARRISTER

March 2010

We were naturally disappointed when the jury of six women held in favour of barrister Mr Dyson Hore-Lacy in the defamation case he had brought in relation to my book 'Getting away with murder'. I genuinely believed that the imputations alleged by Mr Hore-Lacy were not to be found in the words in my book.

With Mum and Sarah Capper (on the left) and Mary Crooks from the Women's Trust on 22 March 2010.

At the time of writing the book I did not know - as was clear from my evidence - that Mr Hore-Lacy had stayed at the Harp Hotel for several hours on the night of Julie Ramage's murder. I did know that Dyson bought Ramage a drink. I did not see the surveillance video from the hotel until it was played in court last week.

This was not a book about Hore-Lacy or the killer James Ramage's three and a half hours in the Harp Hotel, some seven hours after strangling his wife. It was a book about how Ramage killed - I say murdered - his wife Julie and dumped her in a bush grave. And at its heart it was a story about the law of provocation and how it was applied in the trial in 2004. But it didn't stop there. I documented a stream of other 'wife murder' cases, including that of my sister Vicki n 1987.

I've been writing about such murders for twenty years and, sadly, I don't believe the abolition of provocation has brought an end to the injustice. In the past months two manslaughter verdicts involving intimate partner (women) killings leave us, I believe, with much to think about. In both cases killer men were found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder. R v Sherna involved the strangling of a women by her partner, a man who it was said in court had been henpecked for years. I was in court on several occasions during that trial and was taken by how much it sounded like a provocation trial.

It's clearly ironic that a jury of six women would find against me and a book critical of what so many people believe is entrenched bias against women in the criminal justice system. It was not easy, listening to barrister Julian Burnside portray, my sometimes strong words in the book as driven by anger. Maybe one day Mr Burnside and I will have a chance to properly discuss these matters.

Yes, in the opening paragraph of the book I say you have to 'experience murder to understand the anger it generates'. If not for my refusal to be turned into a victim of the criminal justice system I could so easily have written about the sorrow it produces and the pain my mother and father experienced and still experience at the loss of their 25-year-old daughter. To see my well documented deconstruction of the law of provocation interpreted in this way was galling.

Mr Hore-Lacy has won the day and, as we say in the football world, winners are grinners. Just what the court of public opinion thinks is yet to be established.

Fair comment

Much was made - to our detriment - of our attempt to run a fair fair comment defence. Although it's standard practice it was used against us again and again. On Thursday 11 June 2009 in the Victorian Appeal Court Justice Ashley had ruled against us in a judgment I found extremely puzzling. The judgment was supported by Justices Redlich and Neave.

In essence Ashley ruled that my book Getting away with murder must be taken as a book of fact rather than opinion. At law a fair comment defence must be based on the facts truly stated. Justice Ashley found that this was not the case in relation to two particular sets of words used in the book. In evidence in the trial I put a quite different interpretation of the words to which he referred, in particular those on page 217.

More to come...