The compelling story of South Australia's disgraced former chief
forensic pathologist and the legal scandals in which he became
implicated.
For nearly three decades, Dr Colin Manock was in charge of South
Australia's forensic pathology services, and played a vital role within
the state's criminal justice system: in cases of unexpected or
unexplained death, it was his job to determine when a person took their
final breath and whether they had died naturally or as a result of
something more sinister. Throughout his long career, he performed more
than 10,000 autopsies and gave expert scientific evidence in court that
helped secure approximately 400 criminal convictions.
But, remarkably, Manock, a self-described "witness of fact", did not
have the necessary training for such a senior, specialist role, and he
made serious errors in several major cases--with tragic consequences,
including the apparently wrongful imprisonment of innocent people. The
full extent of his wrongdoing and the exact number of cases impacted by
it remains a mystery more than twenty-five years after he retired, due
to the continuing refusal of those in power to heed calls to launch a
formal inquiry into his career.
In this book, Rooke examines several of Manock's most controversial
cases, and speaks with many of his former colleagues, people directly
impacted by his flawed work, and legal experts. At its heart, A Witness
of Fact is about how an entire legal system has failed badly, how
unsafe verdicts have been swept under the carpet--and how forensic
evidence that is admitted in courts of law in Australia and across the
world is dubious more often than we would like to think.
