Higgins’ ‘MeToo’ Eroded the Rule of Law

Is there something in the water in Canberra? Or do idiots just naturally gravitate to the national capital? Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young famously confused TV drama Sea Patrol with a documentary on maritime border protection.

Now, the ACT’s chief prosecutor has apparently confused a TV “reconstruction” with CCTV of an alleged incident.

The senior police officer who led the investigation of Brittany Higgins’s rape allegations has slammed Shane Drumgold for suggesting that police deliberately destroyed or deleted CCTV footage of Ms Higgins and Bruce Lehrmann, claiming the chief prosecutor had embarrassingly confused a Four Corners re-enactment with the real thing […]

Detective Superintendent Scott Moller said the investigating team diverted its efforts and worked for weeks to ­attempt to identify the footage and if such footage ever existed, they had never located it.

The Australian

This is just one of a litany of extraordinary revelations to the Sofronoff inquiry into Brittany Higgins’ rape allegation. The inquiry is showcasing that the Canberra establishment repeatedly frustrated the investigation, either through sheer, dunderheaded incompetence, or, at worst, what appears extraordinarily like deliberate malfeasance.

A senior police officer says when he asked that Brittany Higgins stop doing media that could prejudice Bruce Lehrmann’s rape trial, Victims of Crime Commissioner Heidi Yates told him: “She can’t, Scott – she is the face of the movement now.”

In a submission to the Sofronoff inquiry, Detective Superintendent Scott Moller says Ms Yates was “more interested in Ms Higgins pushing the ‘#metoo’ movement than being committed to the upcoming trial”.

According to Moller, Yates very early on became an obstructive barricade between Higgins and the police.

The inquiry is also examining the conduct of police and Ms Yates, who became a highly visible presence during the trial, often seen accompanying Ms Higgins to court. Earlier in the case, Ms Higgins had asked for any contact by police to be made through Ms Yates, a move that Superintendent Moller says caused serious problems for investigators […]

He felt Ms Yates was attempting to place a barrier between investigators and Ms Higgins.

As Moller points out, Yates appears to be part of a long-running and systematic erosion of the most fundamental norms of justice, especially the presumption of innocence.

“The VCC acting personally in a support/conduit role complicated the investigation and was always highly inappropriate,” he says.

“I felt one of the more upsetting aspects of her involvement was her lack of involvement in other sexual assault matters that were progressing through the courts at the same time.”

Superintendent Moller says there was “significant external and internal pressure” to erode the threshold for charging a person with a sexual offence, and to erode investigators’ “independent and objective search for the truth” […]

As an example, he cites a recent ACT government report by the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Steering Committee that records one of its aims as “to ensure victims survivors know that when they disclose sexual violence they will be believed”.

The Australian

In other words, a mere accusation is a conviction in itself.

Why even bother with trials?