Ms Margaret Cunneen SC
About the speaker
Our speaker today is Ms Margaret Cunneen SC.
Margaret is currently the Commissioner of the Special Commission of Inquiry into matters relating to the Police investigation of certain child sexual abuse allegations in the Catholic Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle. She has been a Crown Prosecutor since 1990 and was appointed a Deputy Senior Crown Prosecutor in 2002. In 2007, she took SILK and was appointed Senior Counsel.
From 1977 and 1981, while studying Law part-time she was a Legal Clerk in the Attorney General’s Ministerial Office and in the Parliamentary Counsel’s Office. From 1981 to 1986 she was an Industrial Officer at the Public Service Board’s Legal Branch. From 1986 to 1990 she was Senior Principal Solicitor at the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, heading the Child Sexual Assault Unit.
Margaret also has a keen interest in upholding the rights of victims of sexual assault and personal violence, and those of families bereaved by homicide, and assisting them in their journeys through the criminal justice system. She has prosecuted many murder trials and sexual assault cases including a series of notable paedophile cases, gang-rape cases and sexual offences committed by medical practitioners and by clergy.
Margaret holds a Bachelor of Laws from the NSW Institute of Technology (NSWIT) and a Master of Laws from the University of Sydney. She has also lectured at the University of New South Wales for many years in child abuse and neglect and pioneered training of doctors practising and giving evidence in sexual other assault cases.
It gives me great pleasure to invite Ms Margaret Cunneen SC to deliver the occasional address.
Speech
The University of Technology Sydney has paid me a profound honour in inviting me to deliver this address on the occasion of your graduation.
May I express my warmest congratulations to all of you who upon whom the University has today conferred degrees and to whom it has granted prizes and honours. You are entitled to feel very proud of your achievements. Your family and friends who accompany you here today and who, no doubt, have supported you on your long journey to this memorable occasion also share your success.
I am enormously proud to say that I was in the very first intake of law students of this Faculty when it began in February 1977. I started Law at NSWIT the same day I started work in the NSW Attorney General’s Department. I’d turned 18 less than a month before.
It was exclusively a part-time course in those days with compulsory Friday night lectures and Saturday exams. Our founding Dean, the late Professor Geoff Bartholomew, had reservations about the staying power of the 6 out of the initial 150 who were school-leavers. The average age of the first intake was mid-thirties and there were some real veterans among us. I was the youngest of all, and one of only 15 women.
The spectre of all those worldly-looking, mature classmates, with their talk of other degrees undertaken, was intimidating and when the Dean, in his first address to us, made the prescient prediction that fewer than a quarter of us would finish the degree within 6 years, I was concerned I would not be one of them.
But I was powerfully motivated by his words and determined to meet his challenge.
As a part-time student one misses the culture and camaraderie of campus life. Our lectures were conducted in the old Anthony Horderns building, where World Square now stands, which had become extinct long before it was the first home of a law school.
In that windowless Limbo we endured all the extremes of climate, torrential water leaks, fire drills which may well have been arranged by the publican of the Century Hotel next door and antique elevators in which one was often trapped, especially after having been to the Century Hotel next door.
There wasn’t a computer in sight or contemplation. The lecturers had an open-door policy – there were no doors.
But before you start to feel sorry for us - there were no fees either.
I think it’s fair to say it was a hard course. A new law school has to prove itself, especially when it is a faculty of an institution which was at that time not a University.
The years that I attended this Law School were undoubtedly the hardest, and most disciplined, of my life.
UTS Law has always been an innovative course and a course for mature, self-motivated, people.
Many of my class-mates and many of those who followed us quickly made their marks in law, business and politics. They, and the vision, dedication and academic excellence of our Deans, professors and lecturers have made the reputation of this Faculty great.
For most of my professional life I’ve practised as a Crown Prosecutor. My motivation has always been to give a voice to the traumatised victim of crime, or to his or her bereaved relatives, whose human rights have been violated in the most direct fashion, by the criminal act of another.
Things have changed enormously in the area of the rights of accused persons and indeed, for people convicted of crimes. It’s not quite 75 years since the last person was executed in NSW and 70 years before that the hangings were done in public, before a bloodthirsty crowd in Forbes St, Darlinghurst.
There were no second chances in those barbaric times.
But from those disturbing beginnings, the rights of persons accused of crime have come so far, in this country, that Australians get about the world blithely thinking that other countries will be as enlightened as we are. It was recently reported that over 1000 Australians on holidays overseas were arrested last year. What most of these people were doing, I’d suggest, was acting as they do here.
Here, where there’s a system of police warnings, cautions and move-on directions, the presumption of bail, highly proficient legal aid, and access to legal advice offered automatically by custody managers in police stations, lenient penalties, great difficulty imposing any form of custody on juveniles, officials at all levels kindly disposed to see crime as the inevitable product of an unfortunate childhood, economic disadvantage, ADHD, depression or some other subjective factor.
The New South Wales criminal justice system has become very civilised. Perhaps it’s no co-incidence that this State, which started its modern life as a gaolhouse, should, with so much practise in the industry, have developed such a sophisticated and progressive system of rights for accused persons.
In my time at the Bar, we’ve moved from credibility-based evidence, with two police officers tendering admissions they had typed in a record of interview (which might be signed or unsigned), to scientific and technological evidence, so that any admission said to have been made to a police officer is not admissible unless it is recorded and can be played to a court.
Before the early 1990’s a brief in a criminal trial consisted of statements of witnesses and the only evidence which was not oral would be photographs, if any were taken, of the scene or the victim.
Now, as you know, a brief in a criminal trial contains evidence supported by a range of technology. There may be DNA, video surveillance, conversations captured by listening devices, telephone intercepts, locations of people pinpointed by mobile phone towers and even CCTV footage of the offence being committed. Not a word said to police by an accused person is put before the court unless there has been a proper caution and unless the whole process is recorded.
It is a very good thing that the criminal law now has a myriad of detailed controls on confessional evidence and on evidence that may have been illegally or improperly obtained. These controls have been applied ever more rigorously over the years in a spirit of the duty of the courts to maintain public confidence in the administration of justice.
But now there are so many cases in which guilt is so plainly provable by science, public confidence seems more likely to be eroded by over emphasis on the rights of the accused at the expense of the community, which has a legitimate right to have criminal activity duly recorded, punished and the offender rehabilitated in his or her own interests and in those of fellow citizens, who are the potential victims of crime.
Conviction of an innocent person is of course an unthinkable horror and the worst nightmare of any prosecutor, or any lawyer. The good news is that, in this State, there has never been a time when it has been less likely to occur.
A life in the law is all about meeting challenges. Meeting challenges can mean the difference between a professional life which is mediocre and mundane and one which is exciting, which makes unique contributions to the development of our law and which leaves you with that exhilarating, natural high which you all, with your great achievements to date, appreciate, that comes from having pushed yourself and succeeded.
Opportunities in your professional life will open up to you repeatedly. And the more opportunities you pursue, and the more enthusiastically you embrace them, the more they will present themselves.
Opportunities will invariably mean more work, stress, perhaps taking professional risks. Just doing nothing, or saying “no”, will often be the easier option. Opportunities will sometimes be terrifying. But I urge you to form the habit of embracing every opportunity.
Law is not an ordinary job. It is made special by its inherent commitment to justice.
Justice must incorporate the concept of the right result. It must, I would commend to you, be bound up in principles of honesty and of truth.
You all have a driving commitment to justice and honesty in abundance.
The danger is that the life and logic of the law can sometimes tend to erode those qualities and we must all be on our guard to ensure our senses of honesty and propriety remain immune and intact as we develop powerful reasoning skills which render us capable of justifying almost anything.
One can always find licence, within the law, to justify one’s position. But justification doesn’t necessarily lead to justice.
What I wish to challenge you to do, in your practice of the law, is to bring your good sense, your humanity and your conscience with you.
Justice isn’t achieved by ambush, attrition or obfuscation. It’s achieved by honesty, integrity and balance.
As lawyers, you have a power. Be good with it.
I congratulate each of you with collegiate affection and I wish you every success and fulfilment in the practise of your profession.
