Vindication
Several appeals to courts or for ministerial intervention were unsuccessful. In 1998, a Western Australian journalist, Estelle Blackburn, advanced the cause of Button's vindication through her book Broken Lives. Following the book's publication, the matter went before the courts again with Button represented by Tom Percy QC and Jonathan Davies.
At the original trial the strongest evidence apart from Button's confession was that his 1962 Simca Aronde had damage consistent with an accident. Trevor Condron was the police officer who had examined John Button's Simca in 1963 but he had not been asked what could have caused the damage at the trial. He told the appeals court that while the car was damaged, the damage was not consistent with hitting a person and that three weeks before Anderson's death, Button had reported to police an accident with a Ford Prefect that had caused matching damage to that seen by Condron. This accident report had been known to police at the original trial but been discounted as irrelevant. The court also heard from Dr Neil Turner who had treated Anderson. He claimed that her injuries were not consistent with Button's vehicle. The world's leading pedestrian accident expert, American William "Rusty" Haight, was flown to Australia and testified that experiments with a biomedical human-form dummy, a similar Simca to Button's and an EJ Holden similar to the one Cooke claimed he was driving when he hit Anderson, matched exactly Cooke's account and excluded the Simca.
Button self-published a book in 1998 titled "Why Me Lord!" which told of his ordeal.
On 25 February 2002, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed Button's conviction after evidence from vehicle crash experts proved that Cooke was most likely the culprit. In a televised interview six months after Button's conviction was quashed, Rosemary Anderson's family refused to embrace the finding and still maintained that Cooke did not kill their daughter and that Button was guilty. Following a meeting with the W.A. Director of Public Prosecutions to discuss the court's findings, the Andersons accepted that Button's innocence was proven but either way, as her escort on the night John Button was still responsible for her safety.
Button now spearheads the Western Australian Innocence Project which aims to free the wrongfully convicted.
Read more about this topic: John Button (campaigner)
Famous quotes containing the word vindication:
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)