Shane Drumgold has bowed to the inevitable and quit as Director of Public Prosecutions for the ACT. The extraordinary fall from grace for the top legal official comes in the wake of the Soffronoff Inquiry, which Drumgold himself requested. The inquiry made damning findings of misconduct against him.
Drumgold, however, appears to be having difficulty accepting that he really did anything seriously wrong.
Mr Drumgold conceded he made “mistakes” in his prosecution of Bruce Lehrmann for the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins but rejected the key findings of Walter Sofronoff KC that he had lied to the Supreme Court and engaged in serious malpractice and grossly unethical conduct. “Having now read the report, I dispute many of the adverse findings about me,” Mr Drumgold said in a statement on Sunday.
I din’t do nuthin’, man!
Ho ho, not this time my friend,
However, Mr Drumgold’s troubles are not over. He may be struck off the roll of barristers and could face charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice or the common law offence of misconduct in public office.
If so, the bizarre twists and turns of the Higgins saga are far from over. Because the acting DPP is Drumgold’s deputy, Anthony Williamson SC. Most likely the ACT government will have to appoint an outside prosecutor, to avoid the obvious conflict of interest of a former deputy prosecuting his former boss.
For its part, the ACT government, after trying to sit on the report for as long as possible, is maintaining radio silence now that the report is out.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr will be under pressure to outline the terms of Mr Drumgold’s departure, including any payout, and to respond to growing demands for an inquiry into previous criminal cases prosecuted by Mr Drumgold.
Mr Barr has declined to respond to questions from The Australian about whether he would institute a review or audit of criminal cases handled by Mr Drumgold. Mr Barr also declined to state whether his government was confident that Mr Drumgold had handled all previous cases he prosecuted as ACT DPP in an ethical and lawful manner.
And Drumgold is staging a monumental pity party.
“My career has been driven by a fire burning within, lit by an early life spent surrounded by the pain of chronic inter-generational social justice. This fire has fuelled a life that took me from a disadvantaged housing commission estate to an esteemed leadership role within the legal profession.”
Did he grow up in the same housing commission estate as Anthony Albanese? It might also be considered whether Drumgolds’ “fire burning within” blinded him to the impartial pursuit of justice — especially the presumption of innocence for an accused.
His parting statement was condemned by Mr Lehrmann’s defence counsel, Steven Whybrow SC, who gave evidence at the inquiry.
“Mr Drumgold’s statement seems to confirm what was blindingly apparent to the defence during the trial … that he saw himself more as a social justice crusader than an independent minister for justice,” Mr Whybrow said.
“This apparent ‘end justifies the means’ explanation for his conduct is frankly alarming coming from a DPP.”
The Australian
As the Brittany Higgins “MeToo” cause celebre collapses harder by the day, the cheerleading left-media are desperately casting about for a new narrative. They’ve settled on attacking the messenger, with some boilerplate Murdoch Derangement Syndrome.
The Murdoch broadsheet has been smacking its chops over what it claims to be the leaked findings of Walter Sofronoff’s inquiry into the conduct of Bruce Lehrmann’s rape trial […]
It’s easy to get carried away with exciting news, but it’s also important to try and get a grip and remember we haven’t actually seen Walter Sofronoff’s report.
“What it claims to be.” “We haven’t actually seen Walter Sofronoff’s report.” That this is a pathetic bit of denialism in directly contradicted later in the same article by the admission that:
The Australian claims it has not broken any embargo because serendipitously it had another leaked copy of the exact same report that conveniently is not the subject of an embargo.
Inconveniently for the Grauniad, too, the ABC have published the same report. But then, the left are lately bizarrely convinced that the ABC is a “far-right” stalking-ground, virtually taken over by the Murdoch media.
It must be a strange and terrifying place, in the heads of the chattering left. After all, they’ve got Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch and climate change (oops, “global boiling”), all fighting for space under their beds.
Particularly rich is the Guardian, which brags to anyone who’ll listen that it “was, for many months, the only paper to write about WikiLeaks or to use any of the documents they were unearthing”, to get on their high horse about media publishing leaked documents.
It is not the function of the people who prepared the report to be giving it to anyone other than the chief minister of the ACT. To do otherwise risks defying the [ACT Inquiries Act] and undermining the functions of the territory government.
The Guardian
The Grauniad doth protest too much, methinks.