Baden-Clay killing deliberate – High Court
Daily Mail – Australia’s highest court has reinstated Gerard Baden-Clay’s murder conviction and ruled he did deliberately kill his wife Allison.
The High Court handed down its highly anticipated decision to reinstate the murder conviction on Wednesday after Queensland prosecutors appealed a controversial decision to downgrade his conviction.
Allison Baden-Clay’s body was found on a creek bank in April 2012 – 10 days after her husband reported her missing from their Brisbane home.
Baden-Clay was charged with her murder about two months later.
The former real estate agent was initially found guilty of murder in 2014 but had his conviction downgraded to manslaughter in December in the Court of Appeal after his lawyers argued he could have unintentionally killed her during an argument.
Queensland’s Director of Public Prosecutions immediately launched an appeal to be considered by the nation’s highest court.
The five-judge bench in the High Court unanimously ordered the original murder conviction to be reinstated on Wednesday.
It found the Court of Appeal had ‘erred in concluding that the jury’s verdict of guilty of murder was unreasonable on the basis that the prosecution had failed to exclude the hypothesis that Gerard Baden-Clay unintentionally killed his wife’.
The High Court found the jury was entitled to consider the whole of the evidence to satisfy themselves he had intended to kill or inflict grievous bodily harm on Allison.