Phuong Ngo, Political Prisoner in N.S.W., Betrayed by the N.S.W. Justice System

In 1994, Labor M.P. John Newman was gunned down in his driveway. It was Australia's first political assassination. Newman had made many enemies with his blunt style.

Fourteen years on, no-one has ever been convicted of pulling the trigger. But Phuong Ngo, a local councillor who lived in Cabramatta, was convicted as the 'mastermind' and has spent ten years behind bars.

As a Fairfield City Councillor, Phuong Ngo worked hard helping members of the Vietnamese community. He was a prominent member of the Vietnamese Catholic diocese. Mr Ngo escaped to Australia as a refugee following the Fall of Saigon. The hell that he experienced at that time is nothing to the hell of his life in the Supermax gaol in Goulburn, an institution condemned by human rights campaigners worldwide for its cruel methods of incarceration, solitary confinement and lack of proper ventilation which often causes prisoners to gasp for breath.

Last year a Four Corners team revisited the case, reviewing court transcripts, talking to key witnesses and forensic experts.

Phuong Ngo has been campaigning for years for an inquiry into his conviction. The Four Corners team uncovered many inconsistencies in their review of the case. The Four Corners programme caused the N.S.W. state Labor government to go into damage control and forced the government to at least appear to hold a proper review of the the matter. This is the same government that has been using the N.S.W. government medical office, HealthQuest, to have public service whistleblowers certified 'insane' in order to silence them. Clearly it is a government that cannot be trusted and the Labor Party is an organization to be feared.

You can watch the 4 Corners programme, as well as other related programmes, here:

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2008/20080407_newman/interviews.htm

On 14th April 2009 Justice Patten delivered a report that was devastating to Phuong Ngo's supporters in which he found that 'nothing casts doubt upon, or raises a sense of unease or disquiet in the conviction of Mr Ngo."

The full report can be read here:

http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/practice_notes/nswsc_pc.nsf/pages/482

Four Corners responded to these findings:

Four Corners stands by the journalism of this program and the issues it raised as worthy of further investigation, when it was broadcast on 7th April 2008.

Following the broadcast, NSW Attorney-General, John Hatzistergos, said, in Parliament, "whilst Four Corners investigations are interesting and informative, they do not substitute for a petition under Part Seven of the Criminal Appeal Act. The procedures for a review under the legislation are only available in exceptional circumstances."

The Chief Justice of NSW, the Honourable JJ Spigelman AC, subsequently received a petition on behalf of Mr Phuong Ngo and convened an inquiry into his conviction for the murder of John Newman.

The Inquiry found that the conviction of Phuong Canh Ngo should not be re-opened.

Four Corners raised legitimate questions about Phuong Ngo's conviction. It is the role of the judicial system to conduct inquiries and produce findings as has now been done.

The N.S.W. Labor government has long been suspected of entrenched corruption, of lying to the public and suppressing dissent by means of Soviet-style psychiatry at HealthQuest, the government medical office. Any government that uses such methods to silence public service whistleblowers deserves a large measure of suspicion. Labor-dominated local councils such as Wollongong have been exposed as corrupt following public inquiries and have been replaced with administrators. Anyone who has attempted to question the system has found themselves up against an evil unimaginable to those who have never had to try to make a stand for truth and justice.

It is clear that it suits the Labor Party to have an innocent person in gaol for the shooting of John Newman. Mr Ngo had political ambitions; he intended to stand for the N.S.W. Upper House (and was therefore not, as was implied in one of the court cases, a 'rival' to John Newman at all). Perhaps those political ambitions coming from a man of honesty and integrity were disturbing to State Labor. The many public servants serving "life sentences" with HealthQuest diagnoses of insanity over their heads, never able to find gainful employment again, well know the extent to which the Labor Party will go to silence its critics.

In N.S.W., the power to appoint judges is left in the hands of the government of the day, despite changes around the world and a move towards the election of judges to reduce the opportunity for political patronage. The final decision is made by the Premier, with no community consultation, no selection criteria and no transparency. Public confidence in the justice system has been undermined in Australia for this reason. Just ask any of the HealthQuest victims who have sought justice in our courts.

And so Acting Judge David Patten, appointed to do the job by the N.S.W. Labor Government, handed down his report on 17th April 2009.

Ms Le had given evidence that police channelled their evidence to pin the murder on Phuong Ngo. She told Justice Patten that the investigating taskforce had ignored evidence which undermined their pursuit of Mr Ngo, including the confession of another man to the crime. Albert Ranse, another Fairfield councillor, allegedly told Ms Le that he shot Newman as revenge for his role in having his son's sentence for a drug-related crime almost doubled.

In an interview read to the hearing, Ms Le told Nick Kaldas, now deputy NSW police commissioner, that Mr Ranse told her he alone shot Mr Newman.

Pulling up behind the MP's car, Mr Ranse said, he fired twice at Mr Newman, watching as he "spun around and I got him again".

"I hated that bastard," Mr Ranse is alleged to have said.

"He deserved to die. I don't have any regrets.

"He put my son away for a long time. I told him I would kill him and I killed him."

Ms Le said Mr Ranse vowed never to repeat his confession, and told her it would be "your word against mine and they're not going to believe you".

Other evidence that was mentioned in the review was that Lucy Wang, who had been living with Newman for eight months, was awarded his entire estate by the Supreme Court in the absence of a will. Lucy Wang was not a suspect in the case.

Three weeks after Justice Patten handed down his findings on Phuong Ngo, on 8th May 2009, the N.S.W. Court of Appeal gave its judgment in the case of MacKinnon v Bluescope Steel Pty Ltd, N.S.W.CA 94. Justice Patten had presided over this case. In their judgment, the three judges of the Court of Appeal unanimously found that Patten had failed to understand the significance of some crucial evidence and failed to engage in the intellectual analysis of the evidence.

The findings can be found on the Austlii website.

Paragraph 116 His Honour’s [Justice Patten's] treatment of the causation issue is so inadequate that even if this Court were prepared to make its own findings on breach of duty, the matter would have to go back for a retrial in any event. This is most regrettable given the substantial amount of court time which was taken up on the question of causation (i.e. 32 hearing days for the oral evidence of the doctors alone).

Paragraph 121: "Had his Honour [Patten] engaged in the intellectual analysis required of him, it would have been clear that his comment at Red 522 (444) was incorrect.

Significantly, Paragraph 122 states:

"The inevitable conclusion is that His Honour [Patten] erred in his treatment of causation. As already indicated, that taken with His Honour's errors in respect of breach of duty makes a retrial inevitable."

So, we may conclude that the judge who conducted the inquiry into Phuong Ngo's conviction for the murder of John Newman was not only appointed by the highly suspect N.S.W. Labor Government, but was also found to have been negligent in his judgment of the case McKinnon vs Bluescope Steel by Ipp JA, McFarlane JA and and Hoeben J, justices of the Supreme Court of N.S.W.

Justice Patten is retired. In N.S.W. judges must retire at the age of 72, but they can still be called in as 'acting judges'. Why did Chief Justice Spigelman recall Justice Patten to conduct this important review? He couldn't get his head around the case MacKinnon vs Bluescope - how was he expected to understand the complexities of the Phuong Ngo case and the new evidence uncovered by 4 Corners? How old is Justice Patten? He married in Chatswood in 1957. He is perhaps 77 years old. How is his mental acuity? His cognitive and perceptual powers? Are his faculties slowing down a little? After all, he made considerable mistakes in McKinnon vs Bluescope. Perhaps we should send him to HealthQuest, the government medical office, to have his cognitive abilities checked. But then HealthQuest is an arm of the State Government, which does their evil bidding, so we could expect a result favourable to State Labor. In N.S.W., there is nowhere to find refuge from injustice and corruption.

The "judicial review" was a travesty of justice and a sham.

Marion Le, a human rights advocate, said the review came at a crucial time in legal history, when the apparent invincibility of the NSW Crime Commission has been called in question because of the drug conspiracy allegations against its officer Mark Standen.

"There are huge issues which go beyond Phuong Ngo, which go to the very heart of justice," Ms Le said.

She said indemnities given to witnesses, who had lied at Ngo's trial,by the Crime Commission were not revoked, even though they were conditional on them telling the truth.

Witnesses were allowed to "concoct" their stories at the commission, she said. She also said the commission had crucial information available to it which it did not disclose to the defence or the court.

"The legal fraternity has been concerned for some time that the Crime Commission is a closed shop," she said.

With the N.S.W. government in debt and clearly collapsing under the burden of past and present mismanagement, the only hope for Phuong Ngo, the election of a different government, may become a reality. Because while Labor holds power, there will never be a proper inquiry.

There must be justice for Phuong Ngo.