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Where to draw the line under ‘Mr Big’
The sting operation known as Mr Big may be responsible for high-profile murder convictions, but it is also to blame for unreliable or false confessions and miscarriages of justice.
Naomi Neilson
For a Mr Big operation to work, there needs to be a lot of moving parts: there’s the fake crime boss behind the moniker, his team of undercover police officers posing as gang members, some pretend criminal activities to really sell it, and a suspect of a very real crime.
Mr Big tells the suspect the whole thing can go away – all he has to do is tell the truth. What then typically follows is the confession.
In an episode of The Lawyers Weekly Show, RMIT University College of Business and Law lecturer Dr Lisanne Adam and University of Sydney senior psychology lecturer Dr Celine Van Golde questioned whether the risk Mr Big poses is worth the reward.
“If we look at the techniques in the Mr Big method, it very quickly goes towards coercive techniques: being paid to say something, being threatened to say something. It questions the integrity of the confession. We should be very careful with this,” Van Golde said.
“One of the main arguments people immediately say is, ‘but they also lead the person to the body’, or it’s not a main confession [because] there is other evidence that is found later on that is also of importance. But the debate we want to start is should we, in our legal system in Australia, allow these types of techniques?”
The Mr Big operation helped to convict Brett Peter Cowan for the murder of 13-year-old Daniel Morcombe in Queensland, who went missing from his local bus stop just weeks before Christmas in 2003.
The detailed confession during the 2011 sting operation led police to the recovery of Morcombe’s remains and clothes.
In 2014, Tasmanian man Stephen Roy Standage was sentenced to 48 years for the murder of Ron Jarvis in 1992 and John Thorne in 2006, partly because of the Mr Big operation. In 2016, he launched an appeal over the use of evidence gathered during that operation.
In an example of it going wrong, Canadian man Nelson Hart was released from custody after he was accused of murdering his twin daughters. The Supreme Court of Canada found his Mr Big confession was unreliable and should not have been used.
Van Golde said that while it is important to the family of a victim and the community that a body is recovered and there is closure, “there is a certain point in our legal system where we have agreed to have certain safeguards for suspects and certain protections”.
“With these cases, all of a sudden they go overboard and we don’t care about them anymore and only hear about cases that go right.
“But what about the cases where it goes wrong and a false confession happens? Do you hear about those cases? We just need to have this debate about whether this method actually fits within our perception of what the legal system stands for,” Van Golde said.
Adam said the first issue to resolve is whether the courts need to step in, if it needs to come from common law, or whether there needs to be legislative intervention to provide stronger safeguards.
“Then we can look at, for instance, the admissibility of these confessions and maybe think about a new test, or additional test, to minimise the risk that these confessions are involuntary or unreliable.
“For instance, did the person confess because they wanted the money that was promised to them, or did they confess because they were telling the truth?” Adam said.
Listen to the full episode here or anywhere you get your podcasts.
Naomi Neilson
Naomi Neilson is a senior journalist with a focus on court reporting for Lawyers Weekly.
You can email Naomi at:
