David Eastman.David Eastman. Photo: Andrew Taylor
The three judges who could make the momentous decision to release David Eastman have been named.
Justices Steven Rares, Michael Wigney and acting Justice Dennis Cowdroy will comprise the full bench of the ACT Supreme Court that will decide the future of the man convicted of killing ACT region police chief Colin Stanley Winchester in 1989.
Assistant Commissioner Winchester was shot dead at close range as he moved to get out of his Ford in his neighbour's driveway on the night of January 10.
Eastman immediately became a suspect and was watched for years, covertly and overtly, before being charged and convicted of murder.
Justices Rares, Wigney, and Cowdroy will now consider the final report of the Eastman inquiry, which called for his conviction to be quashed.
Should the judges follow the inquiry's recommendation, Eastman would be freed after serving 19 years of a life sentence.
Eastman would walk despite inquiry head acting Justice Brian Martin saying that he was ''fairly certain'' of his guilt but had a nagging doubt.
The three judges can only decide from four options; quash the conviction, quash the conviction and order a re-trial, confirm the conviction, or confirm the conviction and recommend the ACT executive pardon the prisoner.
They can consider only acting Justice Martin's report in reaching their decision. Police and prosecutors can make no further submissions to influence them.
A re-trial would be next to impossible, and a pardon appears unlikely.
It's a scenario that would have been hard to predict two years ago, before the order was made to hold the inquiry because of fresh doubt about Eastman's conviction.
But the inquiry, steered mainly by counsel assisting Liesl Chapman, SC, has uncovered some startling evidence.
Most critically, it identified serious flaws with the forensic analysis, greatly weakening the link between Eastman and the crime scene.
The work of Robert Collins Barnes, a Victorian-based expert brought in by the Australian Federal Police to work on the Winchester case, was exposed as unreliable and lacking veracity.
Failings in the duty of prosecutors to disclose material to Eastman's defence, particularly about Barnes, were also identified.