freediver
Gold Member
Offline
www.ozpolitic.com
Posts: 47043
At my desk.
|
Would it make any difference?
The article:
THE State Government has begun legal proceedings to pardon a man hanged in Melbourne 84 years ago for a murder he almost certainly did not commit.
Fresh evidence suggests that Colin Campbell Ross, who was executed for the 1921 killing of 12-year-old Alma Tirtschke — in the infamous Gun Alley murder — was innocent, as he had always claimed.
Attorney-General Rob Hulls has written to Chief Justice Marilyn Warren asking her to consider a plea of mercy for Ross. It is the first time in Victoria's history that a posthumous pardon may be offered.
The unprecedented move comes after legal experts at the Justice Department examined a 31-page petition of mercy, signed by relatives of both the victim and the man convicted of her murder.
Mr Hulls has concluded that there is sufficient doubt about the verdict to warrant a new Supreme Court ruling.
Hawthorn schoolgirl Alma Tirtschke was raped and strangled while in the city running errands for her mother. Her naked body was found by a bottle gatherer in Gun Alley, off Little Collins Street, on December 31.
Ross, who ran a nearby wine bar, was arrested at his Maidstone home on January 12. After a short trial and two failed appeals, he was executed 115 days after the murder.
Prosecutors claimed that Ross, 28, lured Alma into his wine saloon in the Eastern Arcade in Bourke Street, took her into a small room off the main bar, then plied her with alcohol before he raped and strangled her. The court was told Ross then put her body in a nearby laneway, where it was found the next morning.
However, Ross was able to produce alibi witnesses who said they saw him at work and on the tram heading home at the time of the murder.
The key evidence against him was given by two contradictory and unreliable "witnesses" — prostitute Ivy Matthews and career thief Sydney John Harding, who claimed Ross independently "confessed" to the murder.
But the petition of mercy says the prosecution failed to tell the court that Harding was a known and repeated perjurer. The Crown was aware that his military record included convictions for making a false statement to a superior officer and giving false sworn answers on his attestation papers.
The only forensic link came from hairs found on a blanket discovered at Ross' home, which were said to match hairs taken from the victim.
Government analyst Charles Price, a chemist by occupation and not a forensic expert, gave evidence that the hairs "were derived from the scalp of one and the same person".
|