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Chapter 1: What is Erin Patterson's appeal about?
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On this day last year, late in the afternoon, Erin Patterson was called to the witness box in her triple murder trial. I'm Stephen Stockwell, and I remember that moment like it was yesterday. She spent almost two weeks talking to the jury with new twists and turns to the story about the meal that killed her in-laws, but not her.
Everyone wanted to hear what Erin Patterson had to say, captured the attention of the world, and then five weeks later, a jury found her guilty of the murder of Don and Gail Patterson, Heather Wilkinson, and the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson.
She's appealing that verdict, though, and now the Victorian Court of Appeal has confirmed it will be heard later this year, on August 19, with Erin Patterson's appeal for her convictions to be overturned heard alongside the prosecution's appeal for a longer sentence. And we will absolutely follow this story as it unfolds.
Before then, because I know you've probably seen a lot of reporting about this, we thought a refresher on the grounds for this appeal would be handy. And to do that, we're bringing you an episode from when it was lodged with Christian Silver breaking it down for us. I hope you enjoy this. I really liked listening back because there were things I had forgotten in here.
And don't go too far from the Case Soft feed. We've got a special episode for you on Thursday. And then next week, we're bringing you a whole new case. We're going to take you inside the murder trial of Raymond Reddington, a man who in Perth, accused of murdering his wife, Sharon Fulton, in 1986. That case was cold for decades.
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Chapter 2: What were the grounds for Erin Patterson's appeal?
First, though, I mean, can you quickly run us through what those seven grounds are?
Let's run through them, Stocky. Number one, and quite interestingly, Patterson's lawyers say that there was a fundamental irregularity when the jury was sequestered. We'll get into that later. Defence has also taken issue with some of the cell tower evidence and sightings of death cap mushrooms in Loch and Outram. So these were areas that were close to Patterson's house. Mm-hmm.
So they've had issues with that being included in the trial. They've also said that Justice Christopher Beale erred in ruling that photos and videos related to mushrooms that were found at Patterson's house were inadmissible during the prosecution case. And they say there's a substantial miscarriage of justice there. They've got problems with
some of the Facebook evidence which was included in the trial, and this was some of the testimony from Patterson's Facebook friends and other messages which flowed from that, and I'm sure we'll get into that as well. Then they've taken issue with Erin Patterson's cross-examination, which did go for several days. They've called it unfair and oppressive. And then 0.6 and 0.7,
seem to be tied together. I'm not really sure what the difference is there. But they say that there was a substantial miscarriage of justice because the defence claims that the prosecution opened the case saying there was no evidence of motive, but then closed the case by implying that there was a motive.
Yeah. And I mean, all of this, all that we're going through here is kind of contained in like this two-page document that we've got from the Victorian Supreme Court that's been filed by Erin Paterson's lawyers. What's the purpose of this point? Like, what are we trying to do here?
Well, this is just the notice to the court saying, we're lodging an appeal. Here's what it is. But what we know over the coming months is Patterson's lawyers will go through each of these seven points and give the court really detailed written submissions. They'll go to specific paragraphs in the transcripts. So it's crystal clear exactly what they're referring to.
And they'll also look at case law as well. If they say there was a miscarriage of justice, they'll explain why and then probably refer to some old cases later.
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Chapter 3: How did the jury's sequestering impact the trial?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, cool.
And Seven Grounds, is that a lot?
It feels like a lot. I guess they can file as many as they want. Recently in the Greg Lynn appeal, which is another big high profile case, there was four in that one. But even out of those four, it became really dense and there were a lot of... lot of paragraphs contained within each. So I don't know how this one will be structured, but while it is seven, it's kind of really six.
With the closing ones at the end, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Well, we'll get to all of this as we go through the ep. Thank you for kind of giving us the speed run of all of it, and we can dive in and unpack all of them now. Let's not At the end, the end of the trial, I mean, it's actually the first ground of the appeal.
This was the fact that the jury, when they were sequestered, ended up in a hotel with the prosecution, the police and some of the media. And this is, you know, just kind of emerged in the squeeze of the Morwell accommodation and Taralgon accommodation at the time with everything that was going on. What is the issue here? What is the kind of Aaron Patterson's defence pointing at or saying happened?
Yeah.
Well, the whole point of sequestering the jury, you know, taking them away from their family, away from their community and putting them in an isolated hub is to keep them separate from contamination. So the fact that they ended up in the same place as the prosecution, the media and some police witnesses is clearly a failing in an attempt to separate them. However...
The question has to be asked, was the jury's mind contaminated by seeing the prosecutor possibly in the hallway or Stephen Eppenstall, the informant in the reception, or seeing some of the reporters who they've seen in the courtroom for weeks, you know, seeing them around? That's... That's really what the Court of Appeal is going to have to decide.
Now, looking back a few months ago, we were told that kind of nothing untoward happened. But has Patterson's lawyers, have they uncovered something? Is there more to the story other than just some really bad logistical planning? And what Patterson's lawyers say here is that they want the convictions and a retrial to be ordered so that justice cannot only be done, but be seen to be done.
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Chapter 4: What evidence raised issues during the trial?
I mean, most of the other grounds to me, again, this is the first appeal that I've kind of reported on or presented this podcast for at least. They all seem like the sort of thing you would expect an appeal on. And this one with the issue around the jury sequestering is the one that sort of stands out to me.
And the interesting thing is, and you'll know this as well, during the trial we were in Morwell, a very small town. There's, like, not that many facilities in that place. And it was pretty common, even in the lunch break, that you'd be at the cafe and you'd see a couple of jury members. Sometimes you'd have, in one of the big cafes...
you'd have the defence sitting at one table, the other end, the cops, and Ian Wilkinson's come in to get a takeaway and maybe even a couple of jury members. And of course, everyone kept their distance. I didn't see any examples of interaction. And no one's taken issue with that. And that was going on for weeks.
So the fact that this jury sequestering issue, which has probably happened over the course of a few days has been seen to be such a big issue is interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of other grounds to get through, Christian, so we'll run through some of them as well. I mean, there's kind of a few bits of evidence or issue that the defence has taken with some of the evidence presented during the trial. And this is around whether things should have been basically presented to the jury.
And one of them is the cell tower evidence and the iNaturalist post. And the suggestion here, this is my reading of it, so I'll let you kind of correct me, is that that it was too incriminating and that outweighed the value of the evidence. Is that what's being written there? Is that what they're saying?
Yeah, so I think where they're going with this is when they talk about evidence of death cap mushroom sightings in Loch and Outram, this is the post by Tom May, by the other mushroom expert, I forget her name, about seeing mushrooms in this area. And remember, the defence said that there was no evidence that Patterson ever saw these posts.
So maybe what they're hinting at is the prosecution made a big deal about these people posting stuff online, but if there's no evidence that Patterson saw them, was that unfair to her? Did they ask the jury to make a mental leap that was a step too far? That seems to be the argument to me. In terms of cell tower evidence...
This seems to be questioning the evidence of Matthew Sorrell and him placing Erin Patterson's phone in the areas of Loch and Outram around the time that these online posts were made to iNaturalist where death cap mushrooms were cited.
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Chapter 5: Why is the cross-examination of Erin Patterson significant?
Are they saying that there's no evidence that Patterson went to these areas? I think that's where this is going.
Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, really interesting to kind of hear all of this kind of picked apart again at the end of a trial. And we've already kind of like talked through so much of this at the time. And I mean, this is all kind of discussed in pre-trial as well, whether or not evidence will or won't be excluded. So it's interesting to kind of have these discussions again now.
And yeah, Christian, the kind of challenge of working out evidence you know, what they're actually meaning with these grounds. Again, we've got, you know, we're working off kind of a couple of sentences for each one, right?
I'm sure the Director of Public Prosecutions and all the prosecutors involved are also going through this same exercise. They will be preparing their response to this. Of course, they'll be waiting to see exactly what it is that Patterson's lawyers file in a more comprehensive state.
But I'm sure over the coming weeks, they will be pouring through all the transcripts, trying to make sense of where this is going.
Yeah. And... I mean, we've got a few grounds related to evidence here as well. I mean, the next one is basically around, you know, an SD card, some photos and videos that the defence wanted to include. And, I mean, the ground basically says here that, you know, the learned judge, the learned trial judge, Justice Christopher Beale, erred in ruling that they, you know, couldn't be included.
I mean, you know, Christian talking about, you know, kind of how little detail we have in these grounds. Do we know exactly what that's referring to?
It sounds like the defence wanted to try to pick apart something that the prosecution had and weren't given that opportunity and as a result weren't able to disprove something. That's what it sounds like. And a substantial miscarriage of justice has occurred. Looking through the transcripts,
I did find an exchange, which I think this relates to, and if memory serves me right, after this material was excluded from the trial, during the pre-trial phase, the defence tried to reintroduce it. Right. And this led to a discussion when the jury was out of the room and the prosecution was actually saying...
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of the prosecution's appeal for a longer sentence?
So I think the defence was trying to say that Here we've got evidence that Erin Patterson does like foraging for mushrooms and has a history of it, so that when she went and picked some mushrooms in 2023, this is part of an innocent habit that she has. But the prosecution's saying, no, she didn't have this habit. So I think that is what this relates to.
It will be interesting to see how it's explained in detail. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, speaking of the Facebook friends, that's another one of the grounds in this appeal is that, you know, the evidence from the Facebook friends, some of the Facebook messages shouldn't have been included, that, you know, it wasn't kind of relevant to the case.
Is that right? Yeah. That's right. And it feels like the defence is rehashing something that they tried in the pretrial. They tried to have a lot of this stuff knocked out because they felt that Erin Patterson's conversations with her friends weren't relevant to the actual crime itself.
And I remember Colin Mandy making some arguments in the pretrial that Patterson said some things in anger eight months before the lunch and now the prosecution was turning around and using that against her and twisting it. So... This feels like a very similar vibe. Again, they're saying that the Facebook evidence was not relevant and that it caused unfair prejudice to Erin Patterson.
And to sort of flashback to what this was, this was messages where Patterson was being fairly frustrated with her in-laws. I think she said, this family, I swear to effing God. In one of the messages, she was angry about how Don and Gail Patterson weren't intervening in a financial dispute that Erin was having with their son and her husband, Simon.
So the defense again saying that this should never have been in the trial. It was irrelevant. Yeah. and caused another miscarriage of justice towards their client.
And I mean, this is interesting as well. And I'm trying not to lean too hard on the word interesting because don't want him getting your emails. But we had this conversation a lot during the trial that there was no motive being presented for the murders that Erin Patterson committed. So, you know, there was nothing that the prosecution could show as to why she had committed these acts. But then
They also included these messages that showed this kind of frustration and disquiet between Aaron Patterson and the broader Patterson clan.
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Chapter 7: How will the appeals process unfold in the coming months?
And, you know, there's this in the grounds, there seems to be one of them, which is basically saying prosecution said they weren't going to present a motive. And then, you know, they kind of presented these messages and in their closing kind of started suggesting a motive.
Is that something that's not allowed? Yeah. It's really interesting because at the start of the prosecution case, they said that they wouldn't be presenting a motive. And then in the closing arguments, and again, this is in the transcripts, Nanette Rogers repeatedly says, we're not suggesting a motive. However, the defense says that she implied that there was a motive.
And looking through some of this text, again, I'm... I guess I'm trying to put two and two together. There's some passages where Nanette Rogers refers to Erin Patterson sending bitter, angry messages about her in-laws, calling them a lost cause, saying, I don't need anything from these people, this family. I swear to God, I'm sick of this shit. I want nothing to do with them. So F them.
So maybe this is where the defence is heading, And Nanette Rogers is hinted at a whole bunch of things, despite explicitly saying that's not what she's doing.
Yeah, right. So quite subtle, I guess, in the end. You know, it's this sort of, you know, we're not doing this, but then there's also all these other things and the defence has kind of gone, well, actually, there's a line between them.
Yeah. Yeah. That's the argument anyway. I'm sure the prosecution would disagree.
Yeah. Another ground related to the closing in the appeal is that there was a substantial miscarriage of justice in that. That is basically all that ground says. There was a substantial miscarriage of justice in the closing. Christian, do we know what that is or do we now need to wait and find out?
I think that's probably tied to the point we just discussed. Maybe there's some more to it. I don't really know. And on that, Colin Mandy repeatedly in his closing argument really made hay with the fact that the prosecution had no motive. But maybe the defense is saying that he would have gone even harder on that point.
If he knew that Nanette was going to imply, quotation marks there, imply that there was a motive, maybe Colin Mandy would have emphasised the point even more, even though he did repeatedly say it.
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Chapter 8: What can we expect from future episodes of this podcast?
In another case, the Greg Lynn case, there's an appeal being lodged on the basis that the prosecutor didn't put a bunch of accusations to Greg Lynn and then in the closing argument said a whole lot of things about him which Greg couldn't respond to. Nanette's basically done the opposite in this case. She meticulously went through everything. And you remember this article.
Do you agree or disagree? Correct or incorrect? It went on and on and on and on and on. And it was very thorough, but in the eyes of the defence, it went a little bit too far and was oppressive. But, I mean, Patterson also seemed to take issue with anything that was slightly off the mark and wanted to correct the prosecutor. And she also... extended the length of her time on the stand as well.
So I'm interested to see how they're going to argue that it was a miscarriage of justice when Nanette Rogers seemingly was being extremely thorough. But I guess, and you'll remember right towards the end, after like seven or eight days on the stand, Patterson was pretty cranky. And I wasn't in the room for this bit. I was away, but...
I guess the jury probably picked up on the fact that she was sick and tired of it all by that point.
Yeah, yeah. It would have been a gruelling cross-examination for the days that it continued on.
Exhausting.
You could see her getting more and more tired throughout all of that. Christian, since we've last spoken, since you've last done an episode on Erin Patterson, we have had a prosecution appeal as well. What's going on there?
Yeah, yeah. So it's a double appeal, which is going to be great fun when we eventually get to the Court of Appeal. So Patterson was sentenced to life in prison with a non-parole period of 33 years, but the prosecution wanted her locked up for life with no chance of parole. And what the prosecution has taken issue with is that Justice Beale
effectively gave Patterson that parole opportunity because he cited her difficult conditions in prison, you know, how she's in isolation, how that's likely to continue for ages because she's this notorious criminal. And the prosecution says there's no evidence to suggest that Patterson will be in isolation forever and ever.
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