There was clearly a view within the halls of power, political and administrative, that any backlash from Dr Manock’s 30-year tenure had been averted with his retirement shortly before Keogh’s second trial in August 1995. He was gone, the book was closed. Yet out of the blue the kraken raised its ugly head over the most improbable wrongful conviction of them all.
The Attorney-General, Trevor Griffin, had appeared on Four Corners as the reassuring voice of reason, saying, ‘Everyone who makes applications to me as Attorney-General can be assured that they will be properly looked at.’57 For those soft-hearted souls troubled by what they’d seen, this would have been comforting: this is a civilised society, run by fair-minded people, good men all.
Nevertheless, the program did leave viewers with something to mull over:
Dr Manock would not be interviewed and would not discuss the details of any case. So the bewildering questions about how he worked and how he reached his conclusions remain unanswered. What is clear is that there’s much more in question than one man’s competence. The much bigger question is how an entire system has let so many doubts go unresolved in so many cases for so many years.58
Therein lies the real story.
There were some who took the disclosures to heart. On 14 November 2001 Nick Xenophon, then an Independent Member of the South Australian Legislative Council, moved a motion in the upper house that the matters raised be the subject of an independent investigation conducted by a senior legal counsel or a retired Supreme Court judge. The Attorney-General’s reply to parliament epitomised the catch-22 facing those who hope to be treated fairly if they challenge a serious criminal conviction. Having assured the public he would be prepared to ‘properly look at’ any genuine case, he made it clear to the parliament he had no intention of doing so: ‘Let us not react superficially to something that is obviously being promoted for a particular purpose, and that is to discredit Dr Manock … I oppose the motion.’59
The time-honoured escape route from such irritants was to first consult with those who’d played key roles in whatever crisis might require hosing down. The primary source of advice came from Dr Ross James, by then the state’s Director of Forensic Pathology, and the man then responsible for the reputation of the system he’d inherited from Dr Manock. Of all the people who had firsthand knowledge of Dr Manock’s uncertified science Ross James was one of the closest, having worked under him for 20 years.
The next step in quietening the dissenting voices is to smear the messenger. James provided the Attorney-General with the response he was looking for: ‘With regard to the Cheney case the program was mischievous in the sense that there was no material presented which had not already been available to the defence experts before the trial took place.’60 This was in fact the case. The slides were there to be checked. So why did every expert who was asked to look at them not see what Thomas had observed, including Dr James? And if they did, why did the jury not hear of it? During James’s cross-examination in the second trial the matter of the slides and what they represented was laid squarely on the table:
Michael David: You see we have evidence in this case that there was microscopic examination slides taken from the top of the head, two from the left leg and one from the right leg. That is four.
Ross James: Yes, according to Dr Manock’s chart there are four areas designated ‘histology’.
David referred to his notes, then pressed James more:
MD: From that you could say you have seen four slides of bruising?
RJ: Yes.61
That seemed categorical: ‘four slides of bruising’ could only mean the existences of bruises in each slide. Unless of course it wasn’t true.
Among those asking for Dr James’s advice following Professor Thomas’s finding was the man who had prosecuted Keogh, the DPP, Paul Rofe QC. James promptly reassured him in writing there was nothing amiss in the way the case had been handled and he dismissed Four Corners as ‘an attempt to discredit Dr Manock’.62 However, on his letter’s second page there appears an extraordinary admission: ‘Professor Thomas essentially disagreed with Dr Manock about the alleged bruise on the inner aspect of the left ankle of Ms Cheney. He claimed that histopathology failed to confirm this was a bruise. I agree with him.’63
If Professor Thomas’s findings came as a thunderclap this was vastly more disturbing: the expert witness put forward by the Crown had not shared this view through two trials and the six years since Keogh’s conviction. He had informed the jury, ‘A bruise is a fact,’64 which led them to believe that the crucial thumb bruise was one such fact. Remarkably, James reassured the DPP the absence of this ‘fact’ had no impact on the grip theory: ‘While the opposing [thumb] bruise corroborates a grip mark the opposite is not true.’65
Dr Manock was also defended in parliament by the Attorney-General over Four Corners’ criticism of the baby deaths inquest. Griffin maintained the Coroner had not found Manock to be incompetent, merely unskilled in paediatric pathology. It was a generous interpretation of what the inquest had exposed. It ignored the Coroner’s view that Dr Manock was not a truthful and frank witness.
This was the first of many whitewashes by numerous politicians who knew they were playing to a sympathetic crowd. There were no votes in troubling the system on behalf of convicted murderers, particularly one so despised. The hopes of Henry Keogh and his minute band of supporters appeared to have been decisively crushed.