Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  Big Bear’s defence barrister had put him in the witness box during the trial and in his closing address to the jurors reminded them that his client ‘wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed’.

  The eminent QC from Melbourne asked the jurors to consider if they would seriously employ someone with that level of intelligence to carry out a murder for them. Big Bear was found not guilty.5

  Regular court watchers have their favourite seats in public galleries but reporters also need to find seats to do their job. With a couple of exceptions in Sydney courts where seats are reserved for the media, reporters mostly have to sit in the public gallery with everyone else, the court watchers and the family and friends of those involved in the case.

  If you get up and vacate your seat to go outside and file a story, the chances are that you’ll lose it unless you can get someone to physically save it for you. Putting a bag on your seat is no way to guarantee it will remain yours, as I’ve found out the hard way many times. The bag sometimes just gets pushed off.

  In one of the small Downing Centre courts, on 11 November 2014, I was covering the case of the four police officers charged after the death of Brazilian student Roberto Laudizio Curti in the Sydney CBD. I came back into court after filing a story with a heavily pregnant colleague who had also been outside to file. Two solicitors involved in the case had thrown our bags on the floor and taken our seats.

  I said to one solicitor, ‘My colleague is pregnant. Do you mind if she has her seat back?’

  He looked at me and replied, ‘Yeah, so am I’ and just stared straight ahead. We stood for the rest of the hearing.

  When a public gallery is really crowded, the court sheriffs are tasked with herding people closer together to make room on the mostly uncomfortable wooden public gallery seats or, in some instances, allowing reporters to sit in the empty jury box during sentencing hearings. Sometimes at high-profile cases, the public gallery is so full, the sheriffs stop letting more people in due to safety concerns. There can be tension between court watchers and reporters over who should sit where.

  ‘We’re not helping her any more,’ Denis once quietly said of a reporter who asked a court sheriff to remove him from a seat she thought she should have. There were plenty of other seats in the gallery that day.

  To be fair, it is hard as a reporter to stand up the back of a court and write for hours, because all the gallery seats have been taken, but court watchers are not always to blame for this. At the Supreme Court on arraignment days and in the short-matters court at the Downing Centre, there is sometimes standing-room only, mostly due to the number of lawyers in the room. Insiders know that the best way to get a seat in any Sydney court for a big trial is to arrive early and take something to read in the queue outside.

  Reporters and court watchers stood in line for over an hour one day to get into Court 3 in the King Street Courthouse during the Keli Lane murder trial in August 2010. Getting agitated and stressed out by the wait that day, a reporter pulled a face and mouthed ‘anyone for tennis’ behind the back of one well-dressed woman who was wearing an expensive looking white jacket and white skirt.

  Unfortunately the court watcher turned around just at that moment, catching the reporter out and said in a calm and very well-educated voice, ‘Is that how they teach you to behave at journalism school these days?’

  Thankfully the line started to move and I bolted inside the court to avoid any argument between them that may have followed. Conflict avoidance is a key to survival in the court round. There are warring parties inside the court and outside it.

  Sensing he was nearing the end of his life, Denis asked Robin to write to some Supreme Court judges to tell them how much he respected them. Robin did as instructed.

  One letter was to Justice Lucy McCallum on 21 March 2016.

  Dear Justice McCallum,

  My companion Denis Sullivan and I attended Your Honour’s court on many occasions over many years, as I am sure you will recall. You were always so very kind to acknowledge us if you were able to do so which we appreciated immensely.

  Denis passed away last week peacefully in his first ever visit to hospital as a patient in his eighty-seventh year.

  Denis and I felt/feel a special relationship with Your Honour. We never will forget when many years ago you came and spoke with us when we were having lunch at Queens Square seated on our bench. We did not know who you were. After our chat we realised you had to be a judge and we went through all the courts until we found and identified you!

  Denis attended the Supreme Court for about forty years. He had a deep admiration and respect of Your Honour. I join him in this. In discussing his likely near end of life some weeks ago, he specifically asked me to write to you. Denis said that you were a great enhancement to the Bench given that you had in spades the greatest quality he felt a judge needs and that is compassion. I again concur.

  One of our highlights in court was your reply to a barrister who interrupted a cross examination of Your Honour after we had entered court as to whether there were any potential witnesses to the court. I must confess we have dined out a few times on your reply; that we were witnesses who could only give evidence as to how Your Honour was conducting proceedings. I’ll not forget the look on the barrister’s face when he turned around to look at us.

  I am semi retired and have not attended court for six months, mainly looking after Denis. He insisted that I do this after his death and I shall, though I suspect it will be a little difficult. I might bring his lovely hat and colourful yellow scarf.

  Your Honour, there is no need to reply.

  It was Denis wish that you were simply made aware of his utmost admiration and respect for you and above all the gratitude for the kindness you have shown us both.

  Yours sincerely,

  Robin.

  Not expecting a reply from someone as important as a New South Wales Supreme Court judge, Robin was over the moon when Justice McCallum in fact did reply to him.

  In an undated letter that arrived in his mail box a few days later she wrote:

  Dear Robin,

  Thank you for your lovely letter. I suspected your less frequent attendance was probably due to Denis’s failing health. The last time I saw you, even in all his yellow-scarves splendour, he was starting to look quite frail.

  Although I did not know Denis (beyond seeing kindness and mischief in his face), I find myself strangely saddened by his death. You must be missing him very much. I am deeply honoured that you have taken the trouble to pass on his thoughts.

  The feeling that it has been a special relationship is entirely mutual. I know you and Denis spent many hours in many different courts and other public forums but I have permitted myself the indulgence of thinking of you both as part of my court. It is difficult to explain how important this has been to me. As I am sure you know, it is a central principle of our system of justice that courts must be open to the public and must carry out their activities in public. That is a fine and important principle, but one which rings hollow if the public to whom it is directed is eternally absent. Without observers to perceive its operation, open justice feels like an empty deal.

  So apart from being welcome visitors, I came to regard you and Denis as the patient, amiable guardians of open justice in my court. It has always given me great comfort and pleasure to see you both there. I sincerely hope you will find the strength to come again soon. Denis will be there in spirit.

  Warmest regards,

  Lucy McCallum

  For some people who become court watchers, their obsession goes beyond curiosity — they have been involved in a legal matter themselves or have sat on a jury and become so fascinated with the court experience they want to keep observing it.

  Court watcher Angela Thomas was once on a jury herself for a robbery trial. After leaving her professional job in 2004 she is now always first in line to get into courtrooms and likes to sit in the front row of all the major criminal trials. Her favourite cases are murder trial
s based on circumstantial evidence and she insists she can read jurors and work out their personalities.

  ‘Some of them are really smart, some recalcitrant and some are just unhinged,’ she told me one day.

  Angela followed almost every day of the four trials for Robert Xie before he was convicted in January 2017. When Xie was found guilty at the end of the fourth trial, Angela was outraged and convinced it was a miscarriage of justice. She thought that the Crown case against Xie was weak and that he should never have been convicted.6

  Some of the other regular court watchers I run into are Yvonne, a softly spoken woman who catches the bus from her independent-living village, and Luke who is nicknamed ‘Swanny’ or ‘The Swan’ because he is a huge Sydney Swans fan and is in court most days wearing red and white.

  Regular court watcher Peter Rolfe runs the Homicide Survivors Support After Murder group which has about 600 members in Australia and overseas. He started the group after his long-time partner Stephen Dempsey was killed with a bow and arrow by Richard William Leonard, who then dismembered his body and put it in a freezer at Narrabeen in 1994. Peter now devotes his time to supporting families and loved ones of murder victims.7

  There are also court watchers who I see a lot but know little about, such as the man in a suit with a French accent who can be found darting in and out of the courts at the Downing Centre Courts in Liverpool Street most days of the week to watch cases. One day when a woman collapsed gasping for air with an asthma attack in the foyer, this man ran and got a court sheriff, then stood nearby until the ambulance arrived. There was a lot of noise and high drama but the woman seemed fine after a while and walked out of the building on her own.

  Waiting in the foyer outside Court 5 in the King Street Courthouse for the jury to come back in the 2008 trial of Jeffrey Gilham, who was accused of murdering his parents in their Sydney home, one court watcher sat with the media every day and put on a floorshow. He always wore a 1970s style suit and a bright-coloured bow tie with little dots on it. He could juggle three balls in the air and do card tricks to entertain the reporters waiting patiently on the wooden benches. That jury was out for eight days, which seemed like forever to those of us reporters sitting outside the court on jury watch. I shared the bulk of this with an AAP colleague and it was our duty to text the many people on our list if there was any sign of activity in the courtroom.

  The flashy bow tie man could do a range of magic tricks and one day he handed me fake flowers that he produced from under his hat. He told me he used to be an entertainment director on a cruise ship and had sailed all around the world before he had retired and his wife had left him.

  Cruise ship entertainment man disappeared after Jeffrey Gilham was found guilty and we never saw him in a public gallery again. His magic tricks weren’t too bad, so perhaps he had a job offer that lured him out of retirement and back to an ocean cruise liner somewhere.

  Gilham was later acquitted and walked free on appeal.

  During the 2014 ICAC inquiries into former New South Wales Labor government ministers, Sydney Morning Herald reporter Michaela Whitbourne was highly amused that one of the court watchers, who travelled down from the Hunter Valley every day for months, gave her lots of advice on reporting because he thought she was on work experience with Kate McClymont.8 The poor court watcher must have thought it was the longest work-experience secondment ever.

  There is a distinct hierarchy in the world of court watchers and they can be very territorial. The regulars in the court watching community are quick to distance themselves from the fraudsters and convicted criminals who can sometimes be found in public galleries. Not long after I started the round, I noticed a well-dressed young man in the public gallery at most of the big Supreme Court trials and at some of the high-profile cases at the Downing Centre. Sometimes he would approach barristers and offer to carry their bags and I noticed a few took him up on it. Thinking he was an ambitious young law student I admired his enthusiasm because he was in court most days and the barristers seemed to make good use of him.

  After a few months though, a defence barrister took me aside one day and revealed the truth. The law student lookalike had been busted impersonating a solicitor and handing out dodgy business cards. He was very convincing, but the bag carrying has stopped long ago, even though I still see this fellow in public galleries from time to time. Explaining him to a cadet who had been sent with me to court one day, I asked, ‘Have you ever seen the movie Catch Me If You Can?’

  A surprise observer in various public galleries in 2016 and 2017 was a man who had returned home to Sydney after jail time in the United States. Chris Wood was jailed in 2012 and ordered to repay millions of dollars after being convicted of defrauding people by pretending to be a champion jockey with inside knowledge of the racing industry. Although he had no connection with the case at all, he was often seen around the Darlinghurst Courthouse during the 2016 trial of former detective Roger Rogerson and Glen McNamara who were found guilty of murdering Sydney man Jamie Gao during a drug deal. In September 2016, Rogerson and McNamara were given life sentences.

  One wet cold rainy winter’s day in 2013, I was at the Darlinghurst Courthouse for the trial of Giuseppe Di Cianni and Josephine Pintabona. Di Cianni was found guilty and eventually jailed for up to thirty years for the stabbing murders of brothers Albert and Mario Frisoli in their Rozelle home in May 2009. He had disguised himself as an old lady and entered the house to kill them after a long-running dispute over a construction business.

  Mario Frisoli was stabbed twenty-one times and Albert Frisoli twenty-seven times. Josephine Pintabona was found guilty of being an accessory after the fact to the murders, after picking up her boyfriend Di Cianni from the house and travelling to Italy with him a few days later.9 Her original three-year jail sentence was later reduced to two years on appeal.10

  Although beautiful to look at, the Darlinghurst Courthouse is the most impractical for reporters to work in because there’s hardly any shelter outside from the sun or rain, only a couple of power points and limited seating in the foyers.

  I had scored one of the few indoor seats near Court 3 and was filing a story when two court watchers came in and sat on the bench opposite me to eat their packed lunch. They were women I’d seen in the public gallery earlier in the day and they had sandwiches and a thermos of tea.

  After about half an hour, a third woman came into the foyer, smiled and nodded at us all and then sat down next to me, took a magazine out of her handbag and sat quietly reading it. She had her coat collar up and kept her head down in the magazine and it didn’t dawn on me until she got up to leave after about an hour that it was Josephine Pintabona who was on bail during the trial.11

  18

  Crimes against children

  SOME COURT MOMENTS THAT have stayed with me for a long time, involve the death or injury of children, the elderly and animals; those who in my mind are least able to defend themselves. I somehow find it easier to understand if a crime has resulted from an argument between adults, is an act of revenge of one adult on another or is a crime of passion. It doesn’t excuse the crime, but I can see how emotion and ego can take people over and make them do extreme things. Random crimes against children are sickening, but crimes against children by their own parents or other people who know them very well are much worse. Some court cases involving children shock the public when the media first starts reporting on them but at least they spark debate about welfare issues and raise awareness.

  I have covered many cases about children being murdered, thrown away, hated and loathed by people who should have loved them. There have been times in the newsroom when there were so many court cases involving harm to children, it was a case of overload. How many stories about children being treated badly can you fit in one five minute radio bulletin, for example?

  That’s not including the long-running Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that started in April 2013 after demand for a national inqu
iry into the Catholic Church’s handling of abuse allegations. The Child Sex Abuse inquiries ran for such a long time that the ABC rotated the staff covering them so that no reporter would be exposed to the evidence for long periods of time.

  I covered a section of the 2013 New South Wales inquiry into the Catholic Church’s handling of sex abuse complaints about former priests Denis McAlinden and Jim Fletcher in the Newcastle–Hunter area. Some of the most senior police officers in the state gave evidence at the inquiry, which was overseen by the Deputy Senior Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen SC.

  The men had died before the inquiry started, but it was set up by former Premier Barry O’Farrell after allegations by Hunter police Chief Inspector Peter Fox, that members of the church did not report child sex allegations to police, and that he was told to stop investigating how the church was handling the allegations.1

  I also covered the hearing of the Royal Commission that looked at how Scouts Australia and four other organisations responded to allegations against former scout leader Steven Larkins. At the time of that hearing, in September 2014, he was serving a jail sentence for offences that included possessing child pornography. The commission heard the Scouts had made payouts to child sex abuse victims, but officials refused to be drawn on the amounts of money involved.2

  Killer grandfather John Walsh

  On 7 August 2009 I was sitting in a front row of seats near the dock in the Supreme Court in King Street, for the sentence of John Walsh, who, on 30 June 2008 murdered his wife and two young grandchildren, drowned the family dog and tried to murder his daughter Shelly Walsh at Cowra in central west New South Wales.

  He was meant to be babysitting his grandchildren while Shelly Walsh, who was a police officer, worked a night shift in the nearby town of Parkes. After she came home from work and found the bodies, he hit her on the head with an axe. Despite being seriously injured she got away and ran to a neighbour’s house to raise the alarm.