Bail plea fails for Lindy

Press, 3 May 1983, Page 1

Bail plea fails for Lindy

NZPA Canberra Lindy Chamberlain has failed in an attempt to obtain bail while the Australian High Court decides whether to intervene in her conviction and life sentence for the murder of her daughter, Azaria. Mr Justice Brennan yesterday refused the bail application in the High Court, saying that to grant bail would undermine the crucial place of the jury in the system of criminal justice.

Mrs Chamberlain now faces several weeks in custody. It will be at least June, and possibly August, before her application for leave to appeal to the High Court can be heard.

His Honour was told by counsel yesterday that if Mrs Chamberlain’s bail application failed, she would be taken from Sydney’s Mulawa detention centre and returned to Darwin’s Berrima jail.

The Crown counsel also told his Honour that Northern Territory prison authorities had not so far changed their view that Mrs Chamberlain’s new baby, Kahlia, should not be allowed to be with her in jail. After a four-hour adjournment of the bail application, his Honour made it clear that he was aware of the trauma that would be involved in Mrs Chamberlain’s return to custody. However, he found a number of legal points working against Mrs Chamberlain’s bail application, one being that her case had been to the full Federal Court on appeal, and was rejected there last Friday.

“The present application is to release Mrs Chamberlain on bail so that she may return to family life and continue to breast-feed Kahlia pending the disposition of her application for special leave to appeal,” his Honour said.

“I may say at once that I do not think there is any likelihood of her failing to answer her bail if bail were granted. "The poignancy of her return to custody and the traumatic disruption of family life that that involves needs no elaboration,” his Honour said. He said that counsel would argue in the High Court against some of the Federal court’s findings, but as they stood they weighed against the bail application.

Justice Brennan said there was “another factor, of more general and more fundamental significance, which militates against the granting of bail.” That factor was the effect of bail on the role of juries in the criminal law process. The jury was the tribunal to determine whether an accused should be convicted or acquitted.

In serious cases such as the Chamberlain case (where a life sentence followed automatically the verdict of guilty of murder) a bail application was in effect an application to suspend the effect of the verdict.

“To grant bail in such a case is to whittle away the finality of the jury’s finding and to treat the verdict merely as a step in the process of appeal,” his Honour said.

“In the present case, the verdict of the jury has survived an attack upon it in the Federal Court. It cannot be said that it is likely to be set aside.”

Mrs Chamberlain was convicted of the murder of her 9%-week-old daughter, Azaria, in a camping site outside Alice Springs in 1980. She has consistently denied the charge, and her husband, a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher, Michael Chamberlain, has also denied being an accessory after the fact.

Both were found guilty by a jury in the Northern Territory Supreme Court last year. Mrs Chamberlain had a life sentence imposed on her as required by Northern Territory law in murder cases.

After she gave birth to Kahlia in October last year, the Federal Court granted her bail pending the outcome of her appeal to that court, which ultimately failed in Sydney last Friday.