For all the claims to impartiality and open-mindedness by the institutions responsible for administering justice in the ACT, there was an air of inevitability, even predetermination, about David Eastman's failure on Thursday to avoid a retrial over the 1989 murder of Colin Winchester. Mr Eastman may have had his murder conviction quashed last year – along with suggestion by inquiry head Justice Brian Martin that the "applicant" had suffered a "substantial miscarriage of justice" – but the Australian Federal Police, the Office of the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions and, to a lesser extent, the ACT government have all continued to exhibit a firm belief as to his guilt, and a preparedness to pursue him to the bitter end.
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They have resisted attempts to scrutinise questionable police and prosecutor conduct in the murder investigation and the court case, to examine flaws in the gathering and presentation of forensic evidence that came to light after the trial was complete, and indeed to delve into any aspect of the case that might lead to the verdict being overturned. Those efforts appear to have intensified since Justice Martin handed down his findings, even though the fairness and correctness of their actions looks increasingly suspect.
If there's such a thing as the rub of the green in the law, Mr Eastman has not had it. Many of the setbacks and reversals he encountered during his 1994-95 trial (and in subsequent attempts to appeal his sentence of life imprisonment) were of course self-inflicted. Mr Eastman's volatile temperament and self-destructiveness is the stuff of local legend. However, as the Martin inquiry established, he and his legal team were also the unwitting victims of unscrupulous police and prosecutor conduct, apparently borne of an unswerving certainty as to his guilt. For all that confidence, the evidence pointing to guilt beyond reasonable doubt was heavily circumstantial. The most incriminating piece of evidence was gunpowder residue found in Mr Eastman's car allegedly linked to the murder weapon, though this was never found.
The discrediting of this theory has not, it seemed, given rise to any official doubts about Mr Eastman's innocence, but rather a determination that he be retried on the basis of new, as yet undisclosed, evidence. However, the more than two decades that have elapsed since the original trial make the prospects of conviction far from certain. Detectives involved in the original investigation have retired. Most of the lawyers have retired or become judges, or both. Memories will certainly have faded. More crucially, evidence has deteriorated to the point of being inadmissible or being lost entirely. Given this, and the "nagging doubt" that so concerned Justice Martin, a second guilty verdict looks far from assured.
There is a view, widely held, that police-killers are deserving of the severest possible punishment. However, many people will struggle to identify what public purpose will be served by staging another expensive trial of Mr Eastman, other than, perhaps, shielding the AFP and the DDP from accusations of ineptitude.
