Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Louise Milligan, Hachette Australia, $34.99.
For Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist Louise Milligan, this is an intense examination of the power disparity in our legal system.
Witness is a call for change as she exposes the devastating reality of the Australian legal system where exposing the truth is never assured, and justice often eludes victims.
A masterful and deeply troubling expose, Witness is the culmination of almost five years’ work. Milligan was profoundly shocked by what she found, charting the experiences of those who have the courage to come forward and face their abusers in high-profile child abuse and sexual assault cases.
Milligan also reveals never-before-published court transcripts, laying bare the flaws that are ignored, and a court system that can be sexist, unfeeling and weighted towards the rich and powerful.
She interviews high-profile members of the legal profession, including judges and prosecutors. She speaks to the defence lawyers who have worked in these cases, discovering what they really think about victims and the process, and the impact that this has on their own lives.
Witness is both a gripping revelation of rarely-heard opinions from the ‘experts’ about the realism and faults of criminal procedure, and a disturbing critique of the system. The book is further inspired by detailed consideration of the experience of complainants in two high-profile cases, which Milligan had previously covered in Sydney and Melbourne.
Witness is informed, too, by Milligan’s own experience of being cross-examined as a witness in the 2018 committal hearing of Cardinal George Pell. This is where courage is displayed as Milligan divulges the resulting personal toll.
“You don’t sleep the night before that first day in court …” she writes. “You vomit … Your mind spins … You cry …” Her instinctive description of the attempts made in cross-examination to ruin her character and integrity ‘testifies to the brutality of many witnesses’ encounters with the criminal trial process’.
