Decision
Overturning
Conviction (1988)
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The
Lindy Chamberlain Trial
by Douglas
Linder (c)
2005
On August 17, 1980, at a
campsite near Australia's famous Ayer's Rock,
a mother's cry came out of the dark: "My God, my God, the dingo's got
my baby!" Soon the people of an entire continent would be
choosing
sides in a debate over whether the cry heard that night marked an
astonishing and rare human fatality caused by Australia's wild dogs
or was, rather, in the words of the man who would eventually prosecute
her for murder, "a calculated, fanciful lie." A jury of nine men
and
three women came to believe the latter story and convicted Lindy
Chamberlain for the murder of her ten-week-old daughter, Azaria.
Three years later,
while Lindy dealt with daily life in a Darwin
prison, police investigating the death of a fallen climber
discovered Azaria's matinee jacket near a dingo den,
and the Australian public confronted the reality that its justice
system had failed. "A Cry in the Dark," a movie
starring Meryl
Streep, carried the story of Lindy's wrongful conviction across
oceans. What went wrong? Convictions of the innocent usually result from
inaccurate eyewitness testimony (generally the least reliable
evidence in a trial because of biases and the tricks of memory), but
Lindy Chamberlain was convicted by flawed forensic
evidence and by
investigators and prosecutors unwilling to reconsider their assumptions
in the face of contradictory evidence. The trial of Lindy
Chamberlain,
and her husband Michael, is a cautionary tale that everyone who
practices forensic science...[CONTINUED]
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