R V CARROLL 2002 -CASE
High
Court case R v Carroll [2002] had an immense impact regarding the double
jeopardy law which made the public fight for justice to make it retrospective.
In 1973, Raymond John Carroll kidnapped a 16 month old baby girl named Deidre
Kennedy from her family home. It was alleged that Deidre was sexually abused,
strangled and bitten on her thighs, then later was abandoned lying dead on top
of a portable toilet block roof. Carroll was charged on October, 1983 in
Queensland Supreme Court with the murder of baby Deidre and the evidence of the
bite marks incised on her thighs were the initial lead for police to charge
Raymond for the death of the baby. Later the Jury believed that it was wrong to
charge Carroll for the murder due to the lack of sufficient evidence for the
conviction, therefore Carroll’s case was acquitted. By 1999, the Queensland
Public Prosecutions Office gathered fresh and compelling evidence as the
advancement of technology increased. Due to the discovery, the police reopened
the case in Queensland’s High Court and prosecuted him for perjury which is
“the offence of wilfully telling an untruth or making a misrepresentation under
oath,” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2007). However because of the double jeopardy law,
Carroll was protected from any additional trials and the new verdict was set aside
by the Court of Appeal. Queensland Appellate Court stated that “if the evidence
at the perjury trial was substantially identical with that at the earlier
trial, the rule against double jeopardy would be infringed and the prosecution
would amount to an abuse of process” (Williams JA, 2001). Australian High Court
judges claimed that the Crown Prosecutor in the perjury trail abused the
criminal judicial procedure, by doing so the court was attempting to secure a
conviction but Carroll’s lawyer fought against the fact that this had no
relevance to the murder of Deidre and all charges were acquitted once again.