Martin Bryant petition

[Aractus]

Hi guys, please sign this petition if possible, it's only 82 sigs away from its goal:

Now I know a lot of people feel that the facts of Port Arthur are clear enough as it is, and that there's little doubt that Martin Bryant is the assailant. I doubt this for a number of reasons, but I'll summarise them:

1. Firstly, this was a mass shooting in which 35 people were killed. In most mass shootings the assailant, or assailants, want recognition for what they've done. Many of them write a letter, or make a video before hand. Many of them commit suicide after their massacre is "complete". Yet in this case we have a man who not only has denied that he was the shooter for the past 20 years, but showed no interest at any time of recognition for his actions. This points to him being at best an accomplice to somebody else, and at worst a pasty who didn't participate in the massacre at all. The fact that he was apprehended at Seascape following a lengthy police negotiation suggests that he had some involvement, but whether he actually killed anyone on that day is a question I want answered definitively - because right now all the evidence suggests that he was simply manipulated by someone else, and that he may not have killed anyone at all.
   
2. Bryant has no memory of the events. This is now a matter of public record, and it was even known by his lawyer John Avory in 1996. As a matter of public record, Avory stated that his client did not want to plead guilty and it took him over a dozen visits to convince him otherwise. It's recorded in "My Story" by Bryant's mother Carleen, that she agreed to visit her son in gaol at Avory's request and told her mentally inept son that if he didn't agree to plead guilty that he would never see her or his sister again. Something the poor lady says she will deeply regret forever. So Bryant was blackmailed into pleading guilty, even though he told his lawyer he was innocent. What right did Avory have to determine his client's guilt?
   
3. In Bryant's police interview they question him over the guns he owns. He says he owns a shotgun, a semi-automatic rifle, and another semi-automatic rifle. Three guns in total. You can read it for yourself, he even explains where he bought them, how much he paid for them, and the fact that he didn't have a gun license.
   
   The guns that he owned was a Colt AR-15, a Colt AR-10 (which was in possession of a local gun dealer at the time of the massacres) and a Daiwoo Shotgun. He is shown the shotgun and the AR-15 during the course of the interview and identifies them as his guns. Then he is shown the other murder weapon, the FN FAL rifle and says he has never seen it before but it's a nice gun. He says it's "definitely not one of his". He has no motivation whatsoever to lie, not when he's already identified the main murder weapon (the AR-15) as his. But the FN FAL rifle was the murder weapon that killed 8 people out of the 35 - so who's gun was it and where did it come from?
   

Here is a documentary, it already exists on YT but I've uploaded it in better quality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z-qVjVVnZk

It's not at all my point to claim Martin is innocent. I don't know that, what I know is that there are serious questions about the case that have never been answered, and the biggest question of all is - who was the real mastermind, and who were his accomplices? I don't think that Bryant acted alone - if he did then explain where did the FN FAL murder weapon come from, and why did he emphatically tell police he'd never seen it before when he was willing to identify his other guns? That doesn't make any sense. Guilty or not, Bryant was entitled to plead not guilty and have his case heard before a jury of his peers. As it is his case never went to trial, and the coronial inquests into the 35 deaths were (wrongly) cancelled.

[robvalue]

Video is not viewable, it says it is private.

[Aractus]

Video is not viewable, it says it is private.

Sorry, fixed that. No idea why it was published as private.

If you really want you can watch these riveting conference videos:

Code:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJeQ3PgBe4U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvHznRlOVT8

Or read my well-in-need-of-revision blog post.

[ignoramus]

Aractus, wouldn't someone with such a low IQ have inadvertantly given out any information of other conspirators?
I would have thought this case was open and shut?

[ignoramus]

I watched the vid and several others...
An inquiry can't hurt, can it...

My biggest fear is not that he didn't do it, but that he'll get let off via insufficient evidence.

[Aractus]

Aractus, wouldn't someone with such a low IQ have inadvertantly given out any information of other conspirators?
I would have thought this case was open and shut?

Yes he would have. He has no memory of the massacre - confirmed not just by his lawyer, Avory, but by multiple attempts to get details out of him for the two decades since. Reported Deborah Cornwall even noted this in a 2009 report, note that she reports this as an established fact by saying "previously unpublished interviews between Bryant and his lawyer John Avory revealed he had no memory of his crimes, but later revelled in reading the witness statements":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_CmwLyoWQ8

It doesn't matter that he enjoyed reading the witness statements - he was very close to his father, and when he's father committed suicide by drowning himself in a dam, he helped search for his dead father (who they knew had taken his life because he left a suicide note), and was said to be enjoying himself. If he enjoys searching for his suddenly deceased father, then of course he's going to enjoy something like reading traumatised witness statements - that doesn't tell us anything about guilt.

More importantly, it tells us that Avory knew that his client had no memory whatsoever of the massacre, and yet he still blackmailed him into pleading guilty. He then claimed on public record that he did this in the interests of "Australians" (or the victims, I don't remember which off-hand). But he was hired to serve the interests of his client and no one else's.

He was apprehended at Seascape, but since fire destroyed all the evidence at that location it doesn't tell us anything about his movements prior to his lengthy phone conversation with the police negotiator. He mentioned an accomplice "Rick" several times while on the phone to Terry McCarthy (the police negotiator).


Read the interview I linked to. At one point he specifically asks for his lawyer, and by law they had to have stopped the interview and allowed him to contact his lawyer, but instead they tell him "we already spoke to your lawyer so it's OK". As pointed out by Andrew S. MacGregor (and I believe you can corroborate this fact in My Story), in 1994 a court found that Bryant was mentally incompetent to handle his affairs which included the ability for him enter a plea in a court, and therefore his guilty plea in 1996 should not have been accepted by the court.

His legal right to due process was completely violated. Furthermore, the families rights to have open access to full coronial inquests into the 35 deaths was also denied. This is not something that is usual - in any death in Australia where the death of a person is not accompanied by a certificate from a doctor, and inquest is typically held. Yet even though several of the victim families and other survivors were demanding the inquests into the 35 deaths be held, and even though the inquests had been opened - they were all closed without completion. Again, that's just not due process.

The most serious problem of all in the due process was the lawyer John Avory. If you read the interview I linked to you will see that Bryant claims that Terry Hill sold him two guns, and he even says the amounts. He also says he doesn't have a license and that Terry apparently didn't care. Avory represented Hill after police raided him, and he tried to convince Hill to testify against Bryant in return for a police bargain. He refused and was put out of business (not on that charge mind you, but on other charges the police were able to drum up following their raid). This represents a huge conflict of interest before Avory represents Bryant - and from there it just goes from bad to worse. If he was a competent lawyer he would have know that his mentally inept client could not legally enter a plea of guilty due to the 1994 court finding. He was under a court mandated guardianship, which meant that in the eyes of the law he was like a child. Note what Avory said in 2006:

"Mr Avery says Bryant's rights to privacy should be waived for the greater good of giving survivors and families of the victims a chance of closure."

And then there's this from the same 2006 news article:

Forensic psychologist Ian Joblin, who examined Bryant after the massacre, concluded he was borderline intellectually disabled, his IQ equivalent to an 11-year-old. He also found Bryant was sane at the time of the massacre — a conclusion he now doubts.

"I now have serious doubts about whether he was sane, but I'm probably the only one in the world who thinks this," Mr Joblin told The Bulletin. "For someone to make that determination — because of some gripe with the world, because you're pissed off — surely that must come from a warped mind."

Now I want to also backtrack on something else. It's been reported, forever, that Martin killed his "partner" (very close friend) Helen when he reached across from the passenger seat and pulled the steering wheel. Here's an example article from 2009 with this claim in it. Martin's mother, Carleen, denies this. She writes in her book that Helen Harvey had at least 40 cats and 14 pure bread dogs on her property at the time she met Martin. She says that Helen didn't learn to drive until late in life. She claims that Helen's former Taxi driver told her Helen took 19 driving tests before she passed (page 88). After her mother died she started spending her enormous inheritance recklessly such as guying new cars every four months, trading in the previous car (which would then need to be fumigated from the smell of dogs living in them for four months). Says that Helen was a dangerous driver, and that she's just lucky that she only killer herself in the accident and not Martin as well. She says Martin would have never reached for the steering wheel while someone was driving. There were three dogs in the car, two of them along with Helen died instantly in the crash, and Martin's neck nearly broke. Helen was 59 (Martin was 24).

Bryant would refuse to see any visitors, including his mother for many years. In 2006 this was reported, and if you look back to the 2006 article I linked to Carleen said that:

His mother Carleen, in a rare interview, has said her son will not speak to her. "Martin is like a zombie," she told The Bulletin. "He won't speak; he just stares into the middle distance. I can sit in front of him for 15 minutes and he says nothing."

I am pleased to say that was over-reported, in her book she does say that Martin does indeed talk to her before and after this time, so this probably represented a period in time in which Martin became temporarily width-drawn. Here is an interview with her from 2011:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJXcJSxe2fY

By the way when the reporter says he "Confessed" he's actually talking about the same interview I already linked to, this one which is supposedly his "confession". But we know he can't possibly have confessed since he has no memory of the events - which we know because Avory released his confidential conversations with Bryant for everyone to see saying (as I quoted above) that his right to confidentiality should be waved in the interests of victims. Psychiatrist Paul Mullen still claims that Bryant confessed. You have to remember though that this was in 1996, and we didn't know what we now do about "false confessions" and how mentally inept individuals are prone to giving them. There's no details in his interview that he gives freely without being prompted - he doesn't know anything. There were no details that police learned from the interview, and since that time he has never once admitted to the crimes.

The actual report in that video is pretty bad. They get a lot of their facts wrong. There was no "hail of bullets" as they claim - this was the worst ever killing spree conducted by a lone gunman - if we accept that it was a lone gunman. And that's another fact that needs to be examined. If it was that easy to kill 35 people in a massacre, how come more able people who've tried them past and afterward all over the world haven't been able to match that startling number? The kill-to-wound ratio in this massacre is huge, that's why it's wrong to say there was a "hail of bullets". People were very deliberately killed, most of them being shot through the neck or the head. Now I'm not claiming that's "military precision" that ordinary psychos are incapable of, but look at the other massacres in the world - usually the wounded outnumber the killed, and usually they're shot through the chest. But in this massacre, 35 people were killed and only 23 wounded. And of the 35 killed most of them (IIRC about 29-30) were shot through the neck or the head, this just isn't the outcome one would expect from a lone gunman with a low mental capacity.

And this comes neatly back to my point: people who commit these massacres typically want recognition for what they've done. Yet in this one - the world's deadliest massacre by a single gunman - the perpetrator apparently wants no recognition for it? And people who commit these massacres, usually want to die at the end of it. It's usually planned as a murder-suicide - but at no point in the massacre, even several hours later at Seascape, does Bryant try to kill himself.

The idea that it was a lone gunman of low intelligence just doesn't make sense, nor does it fit the apparent evidence. In addition to this, there are 3 or 4 survivors of the massacre who knew Bryant and said that it wasn't him (or more correctly that they didn't recognise the shooter). Yes witness statements are not infallible, but as far as I, or anyone else can tell, not one survivor that knew Bryant could identify him as the killer.

[Aractus]

I watched the vid and several others...
An inquiry can't hurt, can it...

My biggest fear is not that he didn't do it, but that he'll get let off via insufficient evidence.

If there's no evidence there should be no guilty verdict.

Bryant may not have been the shooter, or, he may not have acted alone. We can't know until a proper full investigation and trial is held. This idea that he killed 35 people, without a motive, 8 of which he killed with a gun he didn't own and has no proven experience with, is the far-fetched explanation. There's no need for there to be a conspiracy - perhaps there was, perhaps there wasn't. I don't think there was a conspiracy, I'm not sure whether or not Martin was involved, but I feel pretty sure there had to have been more than one perpetrator that day. And even if Martin was one of them, I doubt that he was the mastermind.

[Aractus]

I should clarify my last statement - I'm not sure to what extent Martin was involved.

But there's some Great Breaking News! The Hon. Vanessa Goodwin has turned over a paper by Ian Matterson (this Ian Matterson:)



The paper is reproduced here, warning it contains explicit details of the massacre.

[Aractus]

Here's the Sunday Night programme that aired tonight:

https://youtu.be/2SYK5Qkyb4s

Needless to say I was not at all impressed by the fact that they gave that criminal John Avery air time. If anything, Avery revealing confidential council between him and his client should prove to everyone that Bryant didn't get competent council, and that he should be entitled to a retrial. Nothing Avery presented was even that incriminating. So Bryant drew a picture of the crimes? So what. The police had shown him photos of every victim, and he was very interested in it and revelled in the detail. The fact that he then drew a diagram of the killings is irrelevant since none of it contains new information, and we know that Bryant has no memory of the events. The fact that he revelled in the details is irrelevant because we know he revelled in the details of a massacre that occurred in Europe a few months prior as well and that he was certainly in no way connected to it.

The police video doesn't contain anything we haven't seen - we already have the complete transcript.

I don't know that Bryant was innocent, and hell I don't even think that. What I think is that there had to have been somebody else involved.