On Trial Australia - The Hotel Bungle

And we've spoken about before that this doesn't always happen anymore.

It's kind of rare to see the juries being sequestered because it's an expensive, difficult process.

And I like how you said that, Chris, it's when the rubber hits the road because lots of people have asked us, well, why are they allowed to go home for this whole long trial that was nearly three months and then suddenly...

But it is, it's for that decision-making process.

And as you said, you obviously really understand the... seriousness of all of these elements, but initially it seemed like a funny story.

What are the elements that then started to appear for you that I suppose built after that first story that you wrote, the things that had maybe happened or not happened at that hotel? Yeah, what have you learnt since then? You've been there,

right? It started out with the jury running into the media and some OPP prosecutors who were checking in the hotel on the Friday night.

And the more I scratched at it, then I discovered there was one or more members of the homicide squad that had been living in the hotel the whole time.

I was tracking people's movements inside the hotel, who was staying where, what entrance they were using.

But what really got me going about it is the more I asked questions about it, the more irritated officialdom became.

The prosecutors, the courts, the police got really aggro that I started asking questions about who was where, what entrance were they were using.

Why did you stay there? When you knew they were there, why didn't you just pick up your stuff and move 20 kilometers up the road if you had to? If you couldn't find another hotel in the area, why not go to Warragul? Why not go to Inverloch? Why not find somewhere else? This is the question that drove me nuts.

After 10 weeks of intensive effort, Why stay in that hotel when you knew the jury was there, particularly because if the shoe had been on the other foot and the defense team had been staying in that same hotel, the OPP and the police would have screamed bloody murder.

So it's almost like a red rag to a bull when you're a judge.

journalist and you're asking questions start saying oh nothing to see here there's always something to see there's something that you just it's sort of you you can't switch off you need to ask questions it's almost something that it's in your dna when you've been doing this as long as you've been doing it chris that there maybe something hasn't gone wrong you know maybe this is all just optics and it is just concern and worry and actually nothing has gone wrong but the The problem is that there were these emails going around in the background.

There were conversations going on that publicly people didn't really know about.

But these are things that you have come across as part of your investigation into this.

And that's when I knew there was something very interesting here, because normally in a situation like this, you get a decline to comment, right? Which I got from everyone involved, the OPP, the police, and the court system.

However, what really piqued my interest was when I kept pressing on the questions, Justice Beal decided to release the emails that have been flying back and forth between the judges' chambers and the parties in the day of...

the decision for the Aaron Patterson jury to come back.

So they felt it was important enough to show that the system had worked as intended and there was no interference by releasing a set of emails where basically the judge had told the parties, this is what's happened in the hotel.

There's, you know, they're staying there.

Shouldn't have happened, but they've moved on.

The fact that the system was allowed to spit out those emails to me, I thought, all right, so they're concerned.

There's concern here that it doesn't look right.