Mareo Case

Press, Volume LXXIX, Issue 23882, 26 February 1943, Page 4

Mareo Case

It is to be hoped that the letter addressed by the member for Tauranga to the Minister of Justice, setting out reasons for the belief that the verdict in the Mareo murder case was mistaken, will have more satisfactory results than followed the petitions of last year. That does not necessarily mean results more satisfactory in that it leads to the upsetting of the verdict, though it may mean this; but it should mean, at least, that the Minister’s attitude and his reasons for it will be defined, and that any reconsideration of the case will be, initially, of the only kind that can be called proper and competent. The petitions were considered by a petitions, committee of the House of Representatives. Its decision, rejecting the petitions, was almost unanimous; but it was the decision of a body without expert qualifications to judge arguments which were essentially technical; and when the committee reported, the Minister was silent. Mareo was convicted because a chain of evidence and of inference or assumption, linked as follows, was considered by the jury to be strong enough for proof, (i) Medical testimony was submitted, tending to the conclusion that Mrs-Mareo died of poison administered late one night, not at any earlier time and not by her own hand, (ii) It could have been administered by her husband, who had then the opportunity and the means, and there was nothing to suggest that it could have, been, and was, administered otherwise. But the circumstantial inference of (ii) was unsupported by evidence of motive—which, admittedly, is not necessary—or by any material evidence to suggest that the milk given to Mrs Mareo was in fact drugged and that Mareo had drugged it. The strength of the inference was supplied by the testimony of (i) above; but it is upon the scientific validity of this testimony, centrally, that doubt is thrown by the report of Sir William Willcox, who found the progress of Mrs Mareo’s symptoms entirely consistent with the theory that she died of an overdose of veronal taken much earlier and (possibly or probably) self-administered. His opinion, with that of Mr E. G. Hemmerde, Recorder of Liverpool, which is directed against the same link in the chain, does not prove that Mareo is innocent. It does not need to. It compels a doubt, and a destructive doubt, if it is sustained, of the grounds on which he was found guilty. It is a doubt raised by an expert in medico-legal science; laymen are not competent to judge it; it should not have been referred to them, or to them only. The value of their finding was only too clearly and heavily discounted by the irrelevant—-and worse—comments with which it was defended: for instance, that to reopen the case would be to “ challenge ” the jury system, and that the trial jury was in a better position to decide “ who " was telling the truth ” than an expert who “ did not hear the evi- “ dence and see the witnesses.” It is not enough that an issue of this nature should be decided. The process by which it is decided must be an appropriate one, such as may fully warrant the Minister in accepting the decision and public responsibility for its effect.