“John Button (campaigner)”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

John Button (born 9 February 1944 in Liverpool, England) is a Western Australian man who was the victim of a significant miscarriage of justice. Button was wrongfully convicted of the manslaughter, by vehicle impact, of his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, in 1963.

History

After 9 February 1963 19-year-old Button argued with 17-year-old girlfriend Rosemary Anderson at his parents' house, Anderson started to walk home. Button followed in his car but Anderson refused to get in and continued walking. After smoking a cigarette Button drove on to find Anderson lying injured and unconscious by the road. He took her to the surgery of a local physician, who summoned an ambulance to transfer her to hospital, where she died. The physician also called police, who took Button to Central Police Station after a short review of the site where Anderson had been injured.^[1]

Button had a bad stutter, which police interpreted this as nervousness. He was refused access to his parents or a lawyer and was hit at least once by a police officer.^[2] After 22 hours of interrogation he confessed to killing Anderson.

Button was charged with willful murder, for which he could have been executed, but the jury convicted him of the lesser charge of manslaughter, for which he was sentenced to 10 years. He served 5 years in Fremantle Prison and Karnet Prison Farm before being paroled.

The serial killer, Eric Edgar Cooke, confessed to the murder of Anderson when arrested in 1963, giving details withheld by police that only the killer would have known, and again when on death row, including immediately before his execution, at which point he swore on a Bible that he was the offender. At Button's subsequent appeal, little credence was given to Cooke's testimony as the vehicle Cooke claimed he had used had an external steel sunvisor. The appeal judges did not believe a body could be thrown "over the roof" as Cooke claimed without ripping the visor off and dismissed the appeal.^[3]

Vindication

Several appeals to courts or for ministerial intervention were unsuccessful.^[4] In 1998, a Western Australian journalist, Estelle Blackburn, advanced the cause of Button's vindication through her book Broken Lives.^[5] Following the book's publication, the matter went before the courts again with Button represented by Tom Percy QC and Jonathan Davies both of whom worked pro bono on the case.

At the original trial the strongest evidence apart from Button's confession was that his 1962 Simca Aronde had damage consistent with an accident. Trevor Condron was the police officer who had examined John Button's Simca in 1963 but he had not been asked what could have caused the damage at the trial. He told the appeals court that while the car was damaged, the damage was not consistent with hitting a person and that three weeks before Anderson's death, Button had reported to police an accident with a Ford Prefect that had caused matching damage to that seen by Condron. This accident report had been known to police at the original trial but been discounted as irrelevant. The court also heard from Dr Neil Turner who had treated Anderson. He claimed that her injuries were not consistent with Button's vehicle. The world's leading pedestrian accident expert, American William "Rusty" Haight, was flown to Australia and testified that experiments with a biomedical human-form dummy, a similar Simca to Button's and an EJ Holden similar to the one Cooke claimed he was driving when he hit Anderson, matched exactly Cooke's account and excluded the Simca.^[6]^[7]

Button self-published a book in 1998 titled "Why Me Lord!" which told of his ordeal.^[8]

On 25 February 2002, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed Button's conviction after evidence from vehicle crash experts proved that Cooke was most likely the culprit.^[9] In a televised interview six months after Button's conviction was quashed, Rosemary Anderson's parents refused to embrace the finding and still maintained that Cooke did not kill their daughter and that Button was guilty. A conference between the Button, Anderson and Cooke families, Blackburn and her publisher Bret Christian organized by Australian Story changed their minds, although Mrs Anderson maintained Button was still responsible as it was his role as her escort on the night to bring her home. Following a meeting with the W.A. Director of Public Prosecutions to discuss the court's findings, the Andersons accepted Button's innocence was proven.^[10]

Button now spearheads the Western Australian Innocence Project which aims to free the wrongfully convicted.^[11]

See also

References

1. ^Button, J. Why Me Lord!. Perth: Digital Document Company. {{ISBN|0-646-36466-9}}. p42,
2. ^Button, J. Why Me Lord!. Perth: Digital Document Company. {{ISBN|0-646-36466-9}}. p49
3. ^In 1998, crash tests with the same model car found that the sunvisor flexed when hit by a body before popping back to its original shape without even cracking the paint. The body (a $2,500 biomedical human-form dummy that behaves exactly as a human body in an accident) was thrown over the roof exactly as Cooke had described and the damage sustained by the vehicle in the test matched exactly the damage recorded by the panel shop that had repaired the vehicle Cooke claimed he had used in 1963.
4. ^{{cite book|author=Blackburn, Estelle|title=Broken lives|year=2001|publisher=Hardie Grant|isbn=174064073X|authorlink=Estelle Blackburn}} (review{{dead link|date=November 2017 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }})
5. ^{{cite book|author=Blackburn, Estelle|title=Broken lives|year=2001|publisher=Hardie Grant|isbn=174064073X|authorlink=Estelle Blackburn}} (review{{dead link|date=November 2017 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }})
6. ^Beamish: action after 40 years {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091005004216/http://www.postnewspapers.com.au/20000610/news/002.shtml |date=5 October 2009 }} The Post
7. ^A Case of Science and Justice The Skeptic Spring 2002 pdf. Haight's crash tests with photographs.
8. ^{{cite book|title=Why Me Lord!|author=Button, J|isbn=0-646-36466-9|publisher=Digital Document Company|location=Perth}}
9. ^{{cite AustLII|WASCA|35|2002|litigants=Button v The Queen |parallelcite=(2002) 25 WAR 382 |courtname=auto}}.
10. ^Murder He Wrote - Part 2 Australian Story 5 August 2002 Transcript
11. ^{{cite news|title=Cost of Innocence|work=The Australian|date=20 September 2006}}