“Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” – Atticus Finch in ‘To kill a Mockingbird‘ by Harper Lee.
It was Greens Attorney General, Shane Rattenbury, who appointed former Queensland Supreme Court judge, Walter Soffranof KC, to inquire into the the criminal justice system in the Australian Capital Territory. This was a mistake. I first met Wally Sofranoff when he was a callow youth freshly appointed to the bar in Queensland. He knew nothing about the criminal justice system. Sofranoff was a gun-for-hire paid by the Queensland government to argue that police did not did not falsify evidence against me in a political trial where the Premier of Queensland refused, via affidavit, to allow my special branch file to be brought into evidence.
Police had planted drugs on me for which I was acquitted. Detective Sergeant Gavin Radford had threatened my life inside the Townsville CIB. Radford said, while I was unlawfully detained, “there is a truck with your name written on it coming for you, Curr” or words to that effect. Detective Sergeant Robert Joseph Donnelly verballed me in the Townsville City Watchhouse after I had been taken down into the cells. Magistrate Winmill ordered that I be taken there and sent to Stuart Creek prison for 14 days for saying to the police prosecutor: “You have him (the magistrate) in your pocket“. Magistrate Windmill was a ‘Joh man’.
Sofranoff has said: “Unlike the United States, for example, both Australia and Hong Kong have a legal profession which, at its centre, insists upon absolute independence of mind on the part of its practitioners. That is to say, there is an appreciation that what a lawyer sells to a client is not absolute loyalty but a limited loyalty.” – Face to Face with The Honourable Justice Walter Sofronoff President of the Queensland Court of Appeal
On the day that I met Sofranoff at the bar table in the Supreme Court of Queensland, he was a determined and overconfident barrister. Sofranoff showed his allegiance to Joh Bjelke-Petersen and to the police who did the Premier’s bidding in 1982. So gullible was Sofranoff’s defence of police lies, that a senior barrister told him off in the robing rooms: The senior barrister said: “Get a grip, Wally, the evidence police brought against Curr is clearly a verbal.” The barrister in question, who went on to be a judge on the Court of Appeal in Queensland, told Sofranoff: “In the unlikely event that Curr would speak to police without a solicitor present, he certainly would not have said the words as expressed in that police record of interview.”
As Magistrate Winmill sent me down for contempt, I was escorted into a room by Det. Sgt Robert Joseph Donnelly and a Det. Barry Maff. Det. Donnelly took this opportunity to verbal me on a charge of wilful damage to the Townsville Courthouse. This was the sole evidence advanced against me in the court, yet it took three years to defeat the charge. In the magistrates court, in the district court, and in the Supreme Court of Qld before the charge was dropped by the crown after a Townsville (T’vlle) jury was ‘hung’ [= could not reach a verdict].
It seems that Walter Sofranoff has not learnt this simple lesson from a senior barrister early in his career. Sofranoff claims his method is akin to ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’: “I repeated this whole thinking process in the cases that followed, including my post-case review of the baselessness of being scared about doing the work that I had chosen as my professional calling. Over time, I became, literally, fearless so that going to court became, generally, a joy and a pleasure. Of course, there were some miserable cases but that is a different story …” His exoneration of police in the Lehrmann rape trial may prove to be one of those miserable cases for the former Solicitor General of Queensland.
In his report to the Attorney General in the Australian Capital Territory Sofranoff writes: “I think that police investigators accomplished a thorough investigation, I have found that they made some mistakes.”
In sexual offence cases, records of a complainant’s confidences to a counsellor are prohibited from disclosure to the prosecution and defence without the leave of the court. Yet police cut corners and released privileged information from the counselling sessions to Lehrmann’s lawyers.
Police did not wish to prosecute Lehrmann. Sofranoff puts this down to understandable mistakes.
And then there was a series of leaks that Walter Sofranoff KC made to the press about privileged information. This could indeed be an annus horribilis for the King’s Counsel.
Conclusion
Walter Sofranoff KC is so shallow he probably bought a red sports car with the money he earnt defending repressive government policies. From personal experience, I would not trust any conclusion the former judge makes regarding police. All of his judgements in the criminal sphere need to be closely scrutinised for bias. As far as civil matters go, a close look needs to be made to check there was no interference.
Although it is about 40 years since I stood at the bar table in the Supreme Court of Queensland when Sofranoff appeared for the crown on behalf of the corrupt Bjelke-Petersen government, I think that callow barrister never lived up to his espoused ideal of “absolute independence of mind on the part of its (legal) practitioners.”
The Leaks to the Australian and to the ABC
Sofranoff admitted leaking his report to a right-wing libertarian commentator, Janet Albrechtsen, employed by the Murdoch Press and an ABC board member. The Australian had been waging a campaign against the prosecutor in the Brittany Higgins rape trial. Albrechtsen’s pen-for-hire wielded the following headlines regarding the prosecutor: “How Drumgold ‘threw his newest junior under the bus’ ; Drumgold, Lisa Wilkinson and the Logies speech lie ; ‘Reopen all of Drumgold’s cases’: legal experts ; Lawyers call for probe into prosecutors ; and Reynolds blasts ‘social crusader’ DPP .
If the ACT authorities are too revisit Drumgold’s old cases, why not review all of Sofranoff’s judgements?
Ian Curr
10 August 2023
References
Face to Face with The Honourable Justice Walter Sofronoff President of the Queensland Court of Appeal
Board of inquiry – criminal justice system by Walter Sofranoff KC
“It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.” – Harper Lee in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird‘.
I spent eight years (1977 – 1985) fighting inside the criminal justice system. Through all the trials, arrests, house invasions, assaults, imprisonment, I held to the improbable belief that at some point I may have a small impact on an unjust system, not to win, but to slow down the political use of the system by government and its puppets in the legal system against our democratic rights. I always felt supported in this endeavour. For our labours we got the Queensland Peaceful Assembly Act 1992. I wonder whether it was worth it?
When Brittany Higgins began her foray into the criminal justice system she was only an intern, and a very junior one at that, even though she thought she had arrived in her ‘dream job’. Grace Tame came onside, as did a number of key women in the media and in the parliament.
Both her boss and the minister appear to have come out against her. Minister Reynolds had referred to Higgins as a “lying cow” after the initial media reports. The Minister claims Brittany never used the word ‘rape’. It is the bosses who were disputing Higgins’ version of events, particularly the timeline.
The former minister is taking Higgins to court accusing her of defamation using all of the resources of a former minister against a former junior staff member.
The Minister and her government do have something to hide; these bosses oversee a toxic workplace, something obvious to a public servant who has worked in Canberra.
By coming out against Brittany Higgins, by calling her a liar, people are, in effect, siding with the bosses.
Plus that position defies common sense. Lehrmann left Higgins drunk and naked in the Minister’s office. What an deadshit!
What has been lost in all of this leaking scandal is that the Sofranoff report was supposed to be about improving the criminal justice system in the ACT given its failure to deal properly with an allegation of rape in a Minister’s office.
Ian Curr
15 August 2023
Copies of the draft report (into the ACT Criminal Justice system) were circulated to those who were to have findings made about them to accord them natural justice. No doubt, those drafts were subject to strict confidentiality conditions.
Despite those conditions, a copy of the draft report was leaked to The Australian.
The Australian, was not subject to any conditions or undertakings in relation to the draft report.
The Australian then received a copy of the final report under strict embargo from Sofranoff, prior to its delivery to the ACT government and its release. It is likely that the final report was substantially unchanged from the draft.
The Australian was then able to confirm and publish the findings from the draft report which survived in the final report without breaching the embargo. The conduct of The Australian in the matter may be questionable but examination of the precise terms of the embargo is necessary to determine the legality of that conduct.
My theory is dependent upon an assumption that there was a leak of a draft copy of the report (and that Sofranoff was naïve in his dealings with the press). How likely is there to have been a leak? Given the history of this matter and the other leaks and curious mishaps, very likely.
In the absence of a confession by the source or disclosure by The Australian both of which will not happen, determination of who is responsible for the leak can only be determined by consideration of who benefits…. Certainly not Drumgold, not Sofranoff or his royal commission officers and staff. It could only be Lehrman or his associates or the police. Lehrman is already foreshadowing another damages claim. The police are no friends of Drumgold.