Around 20,000 households in Hobart will soon receive a ‘fact sheet’ about an upcoming appeal in the Supreme Court for the Sue Neill-Fraser case. The case will determine whether Neill-Fraser, convicted of murdering her partner over a decade ago, was wrongfully convicted.
Wrongful Conviction Report editor Andrew Urban is behind the plan to distribute the fact sheets about Neill-Fraser, convicted in 2010 for the murder of her partner a year earlier. Neill-Fraser is serving a 23-year sentence with 13 years non-parole.
The fact sheet delves into some of the more controversial parts of her trial, including that prosecution used no primary evidence. It sets out that her partner, Bob Chappell, was never found and the prosecution “presented the jury with only circumstantial evidence”, including that they were both onboard a yacht at the time.
“The prosecutor speculated that [Sue Neill-Fraser] murdered Mr Chappell below deck with some weapon like a wrench, winched him up on the deck and into the dingy and then disposed of the body in the water, tied to a fire extinguisher,” Urban explains in the ‘fact sheet’.
The appeal hearing comes after Neill-Fraser exhausted all her appeal options until state laws introduced in 2015 gave her another chance. The new hearing will initially focus on her argument that there is ‘fresh and compelling’ evidence that a 15-year-old girl boarded the vessel and attacked Chappell.
Urban says that DNA in a material deposit 26 cm x 21 cm (roughly the size of an A4 sheet of paper) on the yacht was matched to then homeless Vass, who denied at trial (and subsequently) that she had ever been aboard. “She has since admitted that she had been there and witnessed an on-board fight between Chappell and two males who boarded the yacht with her, and that SNF was not there,” writes Urban in the ‘fact sheet’.
Neill-Fraser’s lawyer said the court could decide to rule on that material or could ask for further grounds of appeal. They include allegations that the evidence led by prosecution was misleading and that the dinghy that was allegedly seen near the yacht around the time of the attack was not the tender.
The ‘fact sheet’ finishes by addressing whether juries can get it wrong, with Urban explaining that while it is rare, they can “if given the wrong information.”
“Convictions were overturned, for example, in the cases of Gordon Wood, Henry Keogh, Steve Fennell, Scott Austic – and in the second half of 2019 alone, five convictions were quashed on appeal because of significant doubts about the reliability of the prosecution’s case and the soundness of the jury’s reasoning,” he said.
The Supreme Court hearing starts on 1 March this year. Two previous appeals against the conviction have been unsuccessful.
