The Folbigg Case: Legal and Scientific Implications

well good afternoon everyone and Welcome to our final panel in our Symposium today um as karon mentioned in her introduction earlier today uh in 2003 Kathleen fig was found guilty in the New South Wales Supreme Court for manslaughter of her baby son Caleb and for the murders of her three children other three children Patrick Sarah and Laura all of them less than 18 months old when they died U between 1989 and 1999 and all four children had died in their sleep and were found still warm by their mother her husband Craig believed Kathleen had killed them and testified against her in the trial now there were two major types of evidence the prosecution used in its case first fig had kept a diary which the prosecution argued showed a mother confessing to her having had violent feelings towards her children and having uh admitting to having killed them and second was the forensic evidence as to the causes of the children's deaths now uh the children had all stopped breathing that much was clear but why they had stopped breathing was unexplained and the potential options were either unknown but natural causes or deliberate Suffocation and as we heard from Chris Milroy earlier on Suffocation doesn't leave any uh your distinctive traces on the body so the AR the prosecution argued it was deliberate supplication and that was what the jury also agreed with fig was sentenced to 40 years imprisonment the media described her as Australia's most dangerous woman monstrous mother and someone who had committed infanticide again and again and again and again her appeals of the conviction first to the New South Wales Court of Criminal appeal and then to the high court were unsuccessful and that exhausted the usual mechanisms available to a defendant to appeal their case and in the our panel this afternoon we're going to talk about that 2003 case um but we're going to particularly concentrate on the Extraordinary Measures that fig and her team pursued after those usual Avenues of appeal had failed and which ultimately led to her being parted in June 2023 after 20 years in jail I'm Laura doors I'm a historian of medicine and the law at the Australian National center for the public awareness of science here at the Anu and I'm I'm interested in how science historically has been communicated to the law and how the law has used science so I'm very keen to hear from our panelists their views on those particular aspects of the fbe case after we've chatted for about 45 minutes I'm going to open it up to you for your questions my guests today are Dr Jason Chin senior lecturer at the Anu College of Law and in his work Jason looks at how research and particularly science research is uh in you informs the legal system and its process and he advocates for how that can be done better uh including being a key voice in calling for changes in how research in forensic science is published and Jason walks the walk as well as talks the talk on that one in his role as the inaugural registered reports editor for forensic science International and he's currently investigating memory reliab intoxicated witnesses as part of an a research collaboration definitely the one to volunteer for as a research participant there and some of you may have attended Jason's workshop last year on uh rethinking science communication in the courts which was where I met him and our second panelist this morning Anamaria Arabia the chief executive of the Australian Academy of Science here in canra uh Anna Maria started her career as a neurologist neuroscientist a neuroscientist sorry um before moving diagonally into the world of Public Service politics and science policy and she's been the CEO of Science and Technology Australia and deputy director at Quon the National Science and Technology Center which my own Center C pass has had a long and very happy relationship with Anna Maria has long been an advocate for science it's public awareness and science for social justice and it was under her leadership that the National Academy of Science played a key role in prompting further inquiry into the fa B commic convictions and ensuring the inquiry heard from appropriate experts so that story to come welcome both thank you thanks for having so let's try to start with that 2003 trial Jason I'll begin with you now the forensic evidence didn't definitively show a cause of death for uh well three of the four children at any rate Caleb and Sarah's deaths had been attributed to SIDS sudden infant death syndrome uh Lura was similarly undetermined but because she was 18 months old that was kind of outside the period that SIDS is usually diagnosed for and Patrick's was held to be a consequence of of um an epileptic disorder now why were these not not just three separate tragedies striking one family what was the prosecution arguing there to connect them essentially right um so I think to answer that I have to give a little bit more context um very I'm not sure I know this is a um this might have been covered already in the the workshop so far but did the Sally Clark case come up no okay so yeah the kind of interesting context to this is that um just prior to the to the trial of Kathleen fulig in 2003 um someone named Sally Clark in the UK was acquitted of uh a murder that she had been convicted of and served about two years in jail uh so her case was um eventually appealed back up to the court of appeal there after the uh criminal review Commission in the UK looked at it um and so she had also been um convicted of those three murders of those murders of her children um just largely on the basis of it's really unlikely that so many tragedies would happen in the same family um and there there was the sort of now Infamous evidence some of you probably know about it Roy Meadow a English pediatrician who gave evidence in the trial um I I'll just quote it uh one sudden infant death in a family is a tragedy two is suspicious and through his murder was proven otherwise which uh we know is kind of fallacious statistical reasoning but also kind of shifts the burden of proof to the um defense right in case like that um so also so one of the reasons that was appealed up to the court of appeal was a statement by the Royal statistical Society in the UK so kind of a precursor to what um Anna Maria did uh where they made a statement saying that there's no basis in like modern stats for this kind of claim um that's so that was like in the mind of the court and the prosecution when this the when Kathleen Fig's case was uh when the prosecutor chose to prosecute it and then how that prosecution unfolded uh and so the court made several decisions there they sort of understood that it couldn't be solely based on the unlikelihood of the the um similar deaths in a family uh but in this case the reason it proceeded was I think because there was the diary in this case um I think all let's talk about The Diary s of there I mean what has she written in it that seemed you know so damning there um oh and maybe I should keep my answer Shor sorry I just it's hard to give context got a whole out so the the Diaries um I think I think the Diaries are fascinating um a lot of things that now and I think to a lot of people always looked like very equivocal statements uh I think I have a quote from one of them at some point here um I can't find it um so so so things like I I really regret what happened next time I'm not going to let this happen again that not saying that she did anything but in the context of everything that people knew about the case and Sarah left with a bit of help was one absolutely um and so on on appeal uh so the I'm skipping ah head to the on the first appeal so the appeal in 2005 about what the jury conviction was um that the jury's decision was reasonable or unreasonable um so we don't know what the jury thought because it's a black box but we know what the appeals judges thought and one of them said that uh that entry was chilling in light of history of of Caleb Patrick Sarah and Laura and assuming they were authentic which was not disputed um the probative value was daming so a judge at the court of appeal just said you know this like in light of what we know this this um this this uh diary entry is damning uh quite interesting thing is as this went on um later at the final I'm really skipping ahead but later at the final inquiry Justice ba for former Justice ba has said that uh it's not an admission at all it's a let's not reveal the ending let's not reveal the ending we have to we have to get there pH so we've got these sort of multiple deaths of Sids in a family and a current understanding well maybe maybe within the medical profession that if one child in the family dies of Sids this doesn't mean that there's a higher risk for other children in the family also dying of of ss so when you get a string of four children all dying of really quite you know fairly rare sort of thing reverting to Meadow's law that that sort of suggests well you know Murder um CU that that's just you know the multiplication of four very rare probabilities is infant has really tiny and then we have this sort of diary being you know sort of um interpreted as essentially a confession um Anam Maria what other interpretations were available of the diary and did the court really explore those other possib interpretations forly no not at all in fact in um the 2019 inquiry which was the first inquiry into her convictions um Reginal blanch was overseeing that and he um is on the record saying words to the effect that he didn't need a psychiatrist or psychologist or anyone to provide him with an interpretation of the words in the diary and remembering there are around 40,000 words written by Kathleen fig over many years and what was Cherry Picked were those that were misinterpreted and most daming and he said that as a l he could read those words and understand what they mean um now this is a a you know someone overseeing a Judicial inquiry um disregarding well not even allowing uh experts to come in and interpret those Diaries um it wasn't challenged that I'm aware of um they were taken at face value uh there was no consideration given to any uh postpartum depression that Kathleen F fing may have been experiencing no consideration given to the circumstances around uh the trauma so ass with four deaths in a family let alone the conviction um and Beyond she wrote and no consideration given to methodologies and interpretation of journaling and most people in journaling uh are encouraged actually to write down everything just get it out on paper um so that sort of context wasn't explored and those very much Cherry Picked Words which were Amplified by the media um were seen as admissions of guilt um and circumstantial evidence in that case really um was given greater weight to any scientific or medical evidence something I I do need to say is that there was an explainable CA cause of death of all of the children really early in the pieace so SIDS was two of them um there were signs of um myocarditis in Laura so her heart muscle was inflamed um it was reported by Pathologists but disregarded and uh Caleb Patrick oh goodness I can't believe I the epilepsy who had epilepsy um and a floppy laryn he effectively couldn't breathe and swallow at the same time so he died very very young uh so individually you could have explained them on medical terms um and indeed there was no light cast on the family until the four after the fourth child and a police officer said oh this is odd what's the chances what are the chances and that misuse of Statistics which you spoke about Jason uh really came to the fall where uh there was a a um calculation made that it was so unlikely when actually you know when we now know of the genetic mutations that at least two of the children had it's actually not so unlikely at at all but um so I strayed from your question around the Diaries but there was no expert um there to interpret the do or even allowed to be he was kind of reading them as if it was you know like a piece of legislation and you just read it with the plain meaning and you know it was not that inad yeah yeah yeah so um kathen fobby was found guilty 2003 none of the appeals extending through to 2007 were successful but during and after that time geneticists um had been doing some interesting work and in particular the two genes for car modulin had been identified in 1987 a third in the 1990s and then investigations in the 2010s uh started to unravel What that particular substance sort of did in the body so and Maria give us a tutorial here what is car modulin and what does it do in the human body um in very very broad terms there are three calmodulin genes calmodulin 2 is the mutation that Kathleen fic herself and her two daughters carried she carries They Carried um and it is a highly preserved Gene what that means is it is really unusual that you have a mutation in this Gene and it's considered uh the the of having the three genes is some redundancy because if you do have a mutation in a gene it can be lethal and indeed it was in the two girls um uh there is also this concept of variable expressivity which means it's not lethal in everybody so Kathleen's alive and in fact one of the um some of the reasoning used against her was you're here you're alive and you know why aren't you dead if you've got this mutation as well um when we know that it is not only expressed L across people it's expressed differently across organs um and indeed one of the uh real issues that's not being explored is that she was never given any access to cardiological treatment or investigation while she was in prison knowing that she had she could in the human body absolutely she had had some uh fainting episodes um she had had particular reactions to circumstances in jail uh if she were out of jail as a free woman she would be seen by a cardiologist regular yeah is involved in heart function heart immediate stopping of the heart cardiac aymas um and the myocarditis that we saw with Laura is very typical of that presentation as well in fact there is an international C modulin registry kogal opathy registry uh which are those people who have mutations in any of the three kogilan genes um I think there are around 180 people on that registry now um and indeed uh at the time time of um this first inquiry there was another family um in Macedonia uh where the children had died and another one where a child had collapsed but was saved um with those mutations so whilst it was very rare it there had been expressions of it so so highly preserved that um uh it is it is quite quite rare to see that change and when it does happen it has it can have lethal consequences like the stopping of the yeah so by 2012 2013 there had been sort of some studies into the you know what affects car modul and its mutations have in the body of course Kathleen fic had already been in jail for 10 years by that point um but uh in 2015 the governor of New South Wales received a petition from University of newcast legal uh newcast Legal Center on behalf of Kathleen fck asking uh them to Institute an inquir the 2019 inquiry that we've been talking about um Jason what in particular prompted this petition um I think from m not so another thing to note is that in 2011 so I think kathin Fig's supporters her friends and um I'm one friend in particular and um some other supporters and the group at Newcastle sort of never really kind of lost faith and they were always kind of in the background I suppose one reason behind the um the petition is what they is they had run out of appeals and through formal processes uh the other thing I would note is that in 2011 Emma kliff's book came out some of you would would know of her um she's an Australian Canadian uh legal scholar who before any of the genetic before any of the new genetic evidence came out uh just un wrote a book pretty much dissecting the piece by piece the evidence and came to the conclusion as some people in like the legal Academia are kind of wey to actually Give opinions on the facts of cases but she came down squarely that she was more likely innocent or not convinced Beyond A Reasonable Doubt um so there was there was Emma's book um there was uh they run of appeals that one other thing I would note is that there was another possible appeal point so this comes out sometimes but one of the jurors had looked up Kathleen's family and found out that her husband had killed her mother her sorry her father had killed her mother um and told that to other jurors and it got out it was never s cross-examined or never became something that the defense could make submissions about and there's an appeal on that I think in 2009 or so and that one um also the court of appeals said that's true but we're not convinced that this would have affected the jury's decision how do you know um back of your question at this point no that's good and you know that discovery that the you know the by the jury that the father had murdered cathine Fig's mother um gave have a certain uh you know light on one of the things that Kathleen had written in her diary where she said I am my father's daughter and you know if you know that the father was a murderer maybe that phrase could be interpreted um in certain sort of ways but yeah so and you mentioned that the the lines of appeal had been sort of exhausted how was the inquiry going to be different to appeals well the Hope was that it's a less formally adversarial procedure and I guess that actually did work out I don't want again skip ahead but the the fact that the second one was less formally adversarial procedure did allow for I think the evidence to be heard a bit better um but I guess the idea is that um you're not constrained by the adversarial structure so you can call a wider range of of evidence you can examine them the the judge examines them and the judge could play better role in examining them I know there is some sort of Quasi adversarial things happening there's Council assisting um but yeah so just a less structured approach so I guess more similar to how you would do it in a inquisitorial jurisdiction now so the inquiry did hear evidence as to two uh you as to possible genetic common you know sort of causes for the children's deaths uh and in fact two different teams of geneticists were engaged by the inquiry to look into this there was a Sydney based team and there was a cber based team uh of Professor Cara Vena and professor Matthew cook both here at the a&u and both of those team syney and cber found that Kathleen and her children shared certain um you know genetic patterns and in particular as Anna Maria has mentioned that Kathleen and her two daughters shared the same variant of that codul and Cal 2 Gene now the Sydney team felt that that particular genetic variant uh was not sufficient to have led to the children's deaths while Professor ven's team thought that uh that Cal 2 variant would have been very very serious so uh two different sort of slightly different interpretations there now Anam Maria did the 2019 inquiry hear everything it needed to hear from the the genetic research um it may have heard it but they certainly won't listening uh so Cora Viner um did put forward her interpretation of the genetic mutations and actually this is a classic example of differences between um uh clinical practice and experimental research so uh those geneticists who practice in the clinic and they were part of the Sydney team looked at this genetic mutation and it didn't fit into certain uh classifications that are used within the clinics to classify children um or anyone really uh to determine what lines of treatment they might need and you can you can imagine that clinical practice and uh the way that's determined is based on pre-existing evidence as it should be you know if I had a stroke I would want the best possible evidence-based uh treatment uh based on all all of those before me but in a novel mutation uh the way youat treat that or the way you classify that or the severity or implications of that mutation are never going to be in clinical guidelines because they are too rare indeed it just won't get there and yet if you're a clinician seeing patients you'll say this is where could be don't you know the likelihood of this mutation leading to their deaths might be 70% whereas corv and waser looked at it from a scientific perspective as somebody whose bread and butter every day is to look at genetic mutations try and understand them try understand the mechanisms behind them and she was in no way convinced that this was uh unlikely or less likely to be pathogenic or or lethal um and so uh she put that case and uh the commissioner at the time said that he preferred and I just I've been told that that's a legal construct or language it's often using courts but from a scientific perspective we don't prefer evidence there's evidence and you know me it's a threshold and a standard of rigorous analysis or not anyway he he preferred the cityne team conclusions and so Cora's evidence was disregarded yeah she um I'm not sure if anyone has ever met corol in waser uh she's a force of nature um I'm yet to be there's nothing she's ever put to me that I'm can push against I think she's just the most persuasive extraordinarily forensic rigorous integral scientist you'll ever meet um she couldn't rest she she felt very uncomfortable with this conclusion but that 2019 inquiry essentially upheld the original trial's verdict but perhaps hadn't really quite grappled with you know what had been sort of discovered in this genetic evidence now we are at the point when the Australian Academy of Science became involved um for those of us who don't work in the Sciences tell us what is the Academy of Science what do you do um we as a general as our call Mission um provide evidence to inform decisions wherever those decisions are made and typically people think about the Australian Academy of Science and learned academies across the world is providing um evidence and and science uh to decision makers usually ministers that's often the audience that is associated with learned academymy but in fact um decisions are made everywhere they're being made in this room right now they're made in the Public Square they're made in courtrooms they're made in classrooms in boardrooms and we increase inly seek to provide scientific evidence in a way that is accessible and synthesized uh to those decision makers wherever those decision makers might be uh this was the first time we had uh played a formal role in a legal inquiry um it's not the first time that the academy had spoken about uh the scientific veracity or lack of um in in a court setting or in a procedural setting so the last time that happened was the Lindy Chamberlin case uh when Ian Fraser and I think it was P or was it um Gus Noel anyway some of our fellows um had written to uh the authorities at the time uh to question uh the scientific Integrity of uh the evidence that was used to convict Lindy Chamberlain um and it was never to the extent that we became involved in the fobby case but there was some history of our involvement in those in those matters and and separately from many years we have been uh looking at matters of the intersection of Science and the law so how was it that the Australian Academy of Science became involved was it via Professor Vin wer it was so she was um really quite frustrated by uh the way science had not been explored or thoroughly explored in that inquiry in 2019 um and shortly after the inquiry uh she had found more evidence in favor of that c modular mutation being pathogenic um and she wrote to the courts and said there is additional evidence and they uh they had not produced their final report but they didn't incorporate that additional evidence so she felt very very uncomfortable and came to the academy as an institution with authority and grabit us and said um can you do anything to help we need assistance here um and you know I'll be honest when she first approached me I said are you sure you've got this right you know this woman's been in jail for several years and isn't there more to this like you know can't just be this C modul mutation and we were rightly skeptical as scientist be um and the more I read and the more she was able to walk me through um the evidence and and and and her personal treatment Cora was heavily discriminated against during that inquiry her scientific um credentials were questioned because of her ethnicity where she was born where she trained she it was really quite extraordinary um that RI her and me so um but it so um we we took a closer look and and um professor John Shan was the president at the time himself an immunologist um at the Gavin Institute where there is a lot of genetic work done and he looked at the evidence and felt something's not right here so what did you do what happened next yeah uh we uh Corolla continued to um gather scientific evidence to try and understand if this C mutation could have been or the likelihood of it being pathogenic in two girls um and so she used her International Network and over that time um was able to bring together 27 experts from around the world from seven different countries each with their own Technical and scientific expertise some people had done functional analysis studies others had looked at uh the implications of that genetic mutation from other aspects um and they published a really seminal paper um often referred to as a brous paper um and that was published in March 2020 and it was on uh the back of that paper uh that a petition was started and that petition um sought uh a mercy plea um to the new South W's Governor uh to give Mercy to Kathleen fig and free her and who's on this petition who signed it uh 90 of many of the fellows of the academy Nobel laurates um are really the some of the most distinguished scientists in Australia and it was on they looked at the evidence they looked at the published evidence and for them it was there was no doubt it was very clear that this case needed to be reinvestigated or she needed uh to be pardoned um and so that was submitted to the governor of New South Wales and the process there as you know is that the governor seeks advice from the attorney general the Attorney General took one year to prepare that advice um and the advice back to the governor general was to call a second inquir which he did very reluctantly and he said as much in the media so if you're keeping count inquiring number two um which you know is is not one of the standard appeal processes so these are extremely Extraordinary Measures prompted by a petition having you sort of nearly a 100 signatories of Australian scientific sort of luminaries on there um so we've got the new genetic evidence but let's go back to the diary evidence though um could I add something yes there were 90 people on that initial petition and there were 165 New South Wales based scientists who want to be but it had been submitted so they started another one so there was this petion going everywhere inquiries going everywhere snowballing support um so it was in the hundreds the foral petition had about I think 96 or something but yes there were many other supporters more than just what subed in that yeah right so yeah um The Diary events we're going to talk about the diary so um you recall that had been interpreted at the trial as a confession basically um Jason how did this now second inquiry uh re-evaluate that diary evidence what did um what did they do now well well yeah anaria mentioned this a little bit but I think um the second inquire inquir was more willing to hear um evidence from psychologists and psychiatrists about what other possible reasons someone could have for using words like these so they weren't allowed to go as far as to say you know my opinion is that this is an admission or confession or not but they would give a bit more context um to that uh and that and that might have been important uh my kind of personal or one of my theories is that you know the next Inquirer was also evaluating the the the Diaries in light of the DNA evidence so he kind of knew that the scientific case was not as strong as previous people thought it was and that there was strong exculpatory evidence and so he's reading those Diaries in from a very different perspective and um I think credit needs to be given to commissioner Baur he could have very in a very focused way concentrated on the genetic evidence alone and he chose not to and he was encouraged not to by Kathleen Fig's legal Representatives as well who presented information that I think he looked at and thought I should do this comprehensively or we're going to be here again for a third inquiry at some point and so he did take the Liberty I think of being quite comprehensive in his assessment of all of the evidence uh not just the genetic evidence and he was very clear that he wasn't going to take as uh given uh the outcomes of the 2019 inquiry he was going to look at that very neutrally and and draw his own conclusions um that's gutsy I think um but he he he went through that in a really rigorous way um the Australian Academy of Science then did something that um as a scientist I don't didn't know all the legal processes I've had a very Step Living C the last four years but um we sought to be legally represented at that inquiry um and we received pro bono assistance from um a legal firm hearing camon Sydney um and they and our we we sought legal representation and it was granted so that's another thing that I think I give credit to commissioner ba SCH he could have said thanks we'll come to you if we need you but you know a legal representation might be too far and he didn't and I think that was his way of saying I want this to be clear and indeed and comprehensive and to have before us all of the information so we can make an informed decision and if it turns out that she's still guilty or we believe there's no Reasonable Doubt well so be will have at least been able to say that we did this comprehensively and what did the academy do during the inquiry I mean we've heard that you know sort of the Academy's petition was one of the mechanisms for prompting it but um you know in being you know legally representative in the inquiry what did that allow the academy to do so they we were granted leave to provide uh recommendations on the best possible experts to give evidence in particular scientific matters to clarify scientific matters as needed and to ensure that the questions put to those expert Witnesses were appropriate and the reason that that's important is that in that first 2019 inquiry there were various questions put to the scientific and medical experts that were out of their field so I'll give one example uh the Sydney team were asked about have you ever seen a case of uh K modul mutation such as this where someone has died in their sleep so not under exertion and under the age of two and they said no and there were many questions put to them and they said no now they weren't lying they had no um understanding or knowledge of the international Co module and register uh which actually held that evidence um so they were effectively asked questions outside of their domain and they were the wrong experts to be asked certain questions so our role in the second inquiry was to ensure there was alignment between best expert and most appropriate questions uh we worked uh mostly behind the scenes we were not given permission to cross-examine um I was pleased in the end that that was the case I don't think that was our role uh we were able to be an independent Scientific Advisor and we were able for every witness including Cora biner to say hey Council assisting this W witness has got a gap in their evidence here here's some scientific questions you might wish to consider um in your interrogation of them uh to clarify that and I think I believe that assisted Council assisting to get what was very um to sort through the gray there's always gray in science and to reach consensus AC across all expert Witnesses those who were arguing the likelihood of the pathogenicity of a c modular mutation being very likely right through to those being unlikely so Council assisting was able to question them in such a way as to gain consensus across all of them where they all did agree and that was the information that Baur was able to use to determine um his views on the genetic side of this however it was really his inter his willingness to then hear from psychologist psychiatrist which we also provided recommendations for um that uh enabled him to investigate all of the different strands of evidence that we used to convict her um and then ultimately led to his his conclusion of Reasonable Doubt as to her conviction so it wasn't just the science a science was a trigger to get there but then the investigation of all of the evidence enabled that and it was comprehensive investigation and that's to be um commended I wish it's a oneoff that I'm aware of I've not seen it happened before and I don't know how we make it happen at SC it needs to happen at Jason your thoughts on this yeah just to emphasize something that's probably obvious is that um in a normal this was an inquiry in a criminal proceeding in most countries um a learning academy can't have legal representation and they not so widely involved so yet yet so um somewhat of this is a data point suggesting that maybe the normal way in which science is ented in courts is that doesn't work very well because of those adversarial restrictions well yeah I have a question about that as well um in the US in the 1970s there was an idea kicking around for a thing they were calling science Court um and this was going to be a specialist tribunal uh that would look at new and developing science uh before it was presented as evidence in a trial and how science colge was going to work was it was going to be different from a trial court it wasn't going to be adversarial it was going to be inquisitorial and the court itself itself was going to call experts to help advise it and help it understand these sorts of things so do you think a process like this science Court would be useful in our system what do you think Jason well it couldn't be much worse than how it's currently do but so yes I guess I in other areas of government work this way so some some regulatory bodies have science scientists on them so it that it can work I think um I mean questions would arise about who picks these these people like how how they're appointed how transparent is is that system and there's there's evidence from my other field of psychology that people um one key component of the procedural fairness or procedural Justice that that people experience is being able to choose their own kind of Advocates and Witnesses so um we challenge some of that stuff but currently the way it's done doesn't work because usually it's only the prosecution that has an expert witness the defense can't afford the own so um and it's someone who's chosen by the prosecution with a particular view from particular discipline so I think would work better than that science is adversarial the way it gets presented yeah so an Maria I mean you've mentioned that you know the Australian Academy of Science acting as this independent Scientific Advisor to the court was just incredibly unusual do you see a potential ongoing role for the academy uh doing that and if so how's that going uh if resourced yes um but look to be honest um I'd like to see that role performed by someone and that that could be the Academy of Science but I think an independent body whatever that body body looks like that's able to bring multi-is disciplinary expertise to inform decisions within the justice system would be uh a significant step forward in the way that system works and the reliability of that system and the way it delivers Justice um it could be the academy I'm not we actually weren't involved in any way to kind of Lobby for an extra role of the academy it was more of a demonstration case to be honest um what we are doing is um from experience in the Kathleen fby case uh we are trying to pursue some more reform that would see the creation of the more science sensitive leing system and we're talking about you know a case here in the criminal system uh that was a wrongful conviction but I want you to think about this more broadly in terms of how courts are and will be increasingly challenged by cyber security technology and crime by AI by Quantum Computing uh when encryption codes broken and our banking system collapses and and cloud computing ceases to exist um there there's going to be legal proceedings um uh litigation that we're already seeing around climate change I mean it isn't new in so much as I remember during my PhD studies um the the cardiologist I was working with said to me um oh I keep getting called into to give evidence around how stress causes heart attacks or not and there is some EV and you know now that's well Advan so this has always been a you know evolving science but I think the the pace of technological change the complexity of it uh the the disciplinary knowledge that's needed across some of those things I've just described between climate change cryptography AI uh high performance Computing is is is at another scale and I think it is unfair to expect a justice system or an illegal system to be able to keep a breast of that um and for jurors to be able to understand the cont text of that information that's presented to them so we do need to find mechanisms to enable the system to be more scientifically literate um we are trying to speak to attorneys across the country including the federal attorney general um look with variable success I think is the best way to describe that but it's ongoing um the doors haven't closed one of the dilemmas of the course is that you know science is a historical process and we've heard that you know the identification of the clinical effects of these codul variants was really only understood sort of a decade after fck had been convicted uh but of course the law had to make a decision um do you feel that the law adequately gets the idea that science changes and could it do better at responding to the fact that science is evolving all the time what I think they do get it and we get that they need to make decisions you can't walk into a court of law and say wait a minute I've need a couple more years in Arc Grant to do yeah we'll come back to you on that in a few more research required as you can't walk into a Minister's office and say I know you need to make a decision about what we do with sarov 2 Transmission in Australia uh but we haven't quite understood that so you know you I think what's important in that context is to communicate uncertainty and we don't see good communication of uncertainty in forensic evidence for example but in a range of WS of evidence that's before the courts um we do appreciate that they need to make a decision and sometimes that decision will be incorrect not at the time but will be will come to be understood to be incorrect uh what's important at that point is that there are mechanisms to enable uh the reinvestigation of some of those cases now it can't be every case you can't leave every case imagine every convicted criminal saying but there's there's still a chance and there is that number of appeals um but one of the things that Jason and I have been speaking about is this concept of the post appeals review mechanism like a criminal case review commission that exists in other countries where when a certain threshold is met so it's not any old evidence or anyone deciding that you should reopen a case but when a threshold is met uh there would be an opportunity or mechanism for the reinvestigation of that case um and and new evidence to come to light that won't happen all the time I mean it will it will happen because we are human and humans make decisions including in our courts and so there will be errors and there will also be new information that was not available previously but a mechanism that doesn't involve getting Australia's Nobel Prize winners to right to the governor yeah well you know Kathleen fig had a team around her that if you had to pay them um no one would have access to and and there there is an inequity there um I think in that Injustice M I'm you somewhat struck by the parallels um you know particularly with the chamberling case which of course you always looms large over any uh case involving uh infanticide in Australia um in particular andar you mentioned um scientific Witnesses giving you're being asked to give an opinion beyond their area of expertise and that of course was one of the conclusions of the royal commission into the Chamberlain case that experts in that case had been asked to aine on things which they were not expert on one you know example was having a UK expert on dogs giving an opinion on dingo um you know sort of beyond the limits of his expertise but I'm particularly think you have the diary evidence here and how that was interpreted in the Fig case and how Lindy Chamberlain's Behavior publicly was interpreted especially by the media I mean do you feel that women are being convicted on the basis of assumptions about you know the right way for mothers to grieve their dead children Jen what do you think yeah so we've been talking about what um what was technically inevidence like before the court but there were all these sort of latent stereotypes and um uh myths about how people are meant to behave in certain situations that the jurors as humans are going to have and it's never fully articulated you can't cross-examine that it's just things that they think and the same with the with the few jurors who knew about her father right this was never the subject of of evidence and submission so um just you know based on what we know about humans surely plays a role these days we'd say creates a b wouldn't we we'd say that it's a a a bias or a subconscious kind of context within which you would view evidence whether you were doing that formally in in a trial or appeals process or in the public um Court of uh of in the public generally uh so one of the things that has been really interesting um is to listen to uh there was a um public relations a media company who assisted in Kathleen's in the media around u in the lead up to that that second inquiry and um Beyond um and they had they speak about having had a strategic objective uh to change the Public's view of Kathleen from this murderous terrible person who must have been guilty to maybe she's not yes um and to have some of that momentum build um because that was important in media reporting which therefore impacts have someone sitting in the courtroom even though it's not in evidence forly we actually experienced some of that um in preparing for the Symposium today because we were looking into using a photo of Kathleen fig for our poster and we're not able to do that because we were calling it the lethal maternal well on that where we finish up with a wood for science communication and uh the public awareness of science please would you thank our panel guests [Applause]