COMMENT: NICK KALDAS is supportive of the Crown Prosecutor whose allegedly unethical courtroom practices have led to the ruination of innocent people’s lives:-
Mark Tedeschi was Crown Prosecutor in (but not limited to) the Gordon Wood's case, the Tim Anderson case (the Hilton Bombing) and the *Keli Lane case. 'Solicitor Paul Kenny says he was another Tedeschi casualty'.
(He was also the Crown Prosecutor in the Ivan Milat case in which the judge found that there was no proof that Ivan Milat murdered any of the victims and no proof that he was even in the Belanglo State Forest [where the murders took place]. DNA obtained from two of the bodies – Joanne Clarke and Caroline Walters – was not that of Ivan Milat or any member of his family. There is fresh and compelling evidence for a retrial for Ivan Milat.)
*(Keli Lane was convicted of murdering her own baby. A week after she was sentenced, a taxi driver claimed that Lane had left her baby and its bottle next to a tree, a woman he found with the baby had said that she would look after it and he handed the baby to her. Ref. The Sydney Morning Herald article 'Lane dumped baby in bushland: taxi driver' 18/4/'2011.)
From ABC 7.30 12/03/2012: Gordon Wood's murder conviction over the death of his girlfriend Caroline Byrne was quashed by the NSW Appeal Court leading to questions being asked about other cases overseen by prosecutor Mark Tedeschi. ... [The appeal judges said 'Mr Tedeschi had tried to bolster the Crown case by resorting to fiction, impermissible reasoning and innuendo'.]
Mark Tedeschi's detractors say he does have a history of complaints; in fact he's the only prosecutor in the state who's ever faced a legal tribunal over allegations of professional misconduct. To date though, not one complaint has ever stuck.
Former Ananda Marga member Tim Anderson pursued Mark Tedeschi for 12 years after a 1991 Appeal Court decision threw out Anderson's conviction for the murder of three people in the notorious Hilton Hotel bombing.
TIM ANDERSON: The Legal Aid Commission laid almost 50 complaints against Tedeschi to the Bar Council. None of it came to anything. And we see the result with the Gordon Wood case - 20 years on, the conduct hasn't changed at all. The pattern is the same.
DEBORAH CORNWALL: Solicitor Paul Kenny says he was another Tedeschi casualty. Kenny had been an undercover detective in the New South Wales Drug Squad when internal affairs police charged him with conspiring to pervert the course of justice and demanding bribes from a heroin dealer.
It was Tedeschi who led the prosecution. ...
DEBORAH CORNWALL: The prosecution ultimately withdrew the charges. Tedeschi later castigated in a judicial inquiry, Justice John Naden noting he found it frightening that Tedeschi didn't even concede the possibility that Kenny was innocent and his whole case had been based on the word of a couple of crooks. But again, the inquiry found no evidence Tedeschi had acted improperly.
PAUL KENNY: I've read Gordon Wood's judgment by Court of Criminal Appeal, the comments by the judges, and they're very similar to the situation that I was in. It seems to be a very similar course of conduct by the prosecutor. You're supposed to present credible witnesses. ...
NICK KALDAS: Looking at it from the perspective of someone who's had over a decade involvement in homicide investigations, the last four years as the commander of the homicide squad, I can only say that thank God that Mark Tedeschi has been a Crown Prosecutor in the state of New South Wales.
