ACT Director of Public Prosecutions Shane Drumgold, 58, has provided his resignation within the wake of the leaked Sofronoff report and can enter retirement.
Sources confirmed to information.com.au that he had tendered his resignation and the ACT authorities will announce his departure on Monday.
Mr Drumgold has been on paid depart since Could when he ended a torrid day within the witness field.
Mr Drumgold has been a prosecutor for the ACT DPP since 2002 and had been within the position of the territory chief prosecutor for the previous 4 years.
It’s a surprising final result after Mr Drumgold successfully demanded the inquiry in a livid letter to ACT Chief Police Officer Neil Gaughan on November 1, 2022, which included what the inquiry described as “scandalous allegations” about political interference.
“The outcome has been a public inquiry, which was not justified by any of his allegations, that has triggered lasting ache to many individuals and which has demonstrated his allegations to be not simply incorrect, however wholly false and with none rational foundation,” Mr Sofronoff finds.
Mr Drumgold instructed colleagues he was left “in absolute shock” over the report being offered to 2 media shops by the inquiry chairman Walter Sofronoff KC with out the authorisation of the ACT Authorities.
Mr Drumgold has been left distressed in current days after media shops camped out on his garden as his youngsters got here and went from the home.
Contacted by information.com.au on Thursday, Mr Drumgold confirmed he had not been supplied with a duplicate of the 600-page report.
“I nonetheless don’t know what’s within the report. Aside from what I’ve learn within the newspaper,’’ he instructed information.com.au on Thursday.
“Sadly I’ve neither seen the report nor have I been knowledgeable of any content material, so I’m not able to reply.”
It’s understood that the Board of Inquiry did inform the authorized representatives of anybody who’s the topic of an adversarial discovering and allowed counsel to make submissions.
Traumatic childhood of man who rose to turn out to be DPP
When he was appointed to the position, the beginner boxer was Australia’s first Indigenous DPP, a place he had reached after leaving faculty and residential when he was 15.
Mr Drumgold has beforehand spoken of rising up in Mount Druitt within the Sixties and 70s, his strongest childhood recollections had been of ready for his dad in drug rehab.
“We had been in ready rooms to see him in certainly one of three environments – a drug rehab, a psychological establishment or jail,” he says.
“And I believed that’s the way in which life existed. I believed this was life.”
In a ebook he wrote, the barrister discusses the demise of his father who took his personal life after affected by extreme psychiatric sickness and a youthful brother who died at three from encephalitis.
“Rising up, I skilled first-hand that people deal with people who find themselves weak, injured and socially totally different as most different pack mammals, by excluding them from the pack,’’ he wrote.
“Often, the pack provides them the left-over carcass of charity or social welfare, however this solely to make sure, deep down, that these individuals don’t get too near the pack. When individuals like my household die, they don’t get parks or buildings named after them: they only stop to exist.
“Our three lives have been as totally different as three lives may probably be, but we share an inescapable bond that endures via time and social circumstance. A bond that has instilled in me the unalienable perception that everyone issues.”
Report finds choice to cost and prosecute Bruce Lehrmann was correct
The Sofronoff report discovered that the choice by police to cost and prosecute Bruce Lehrmann was a justified plan of action.
That discovering shouldn’t be a mirrored image on the guilt or innocence of the previous Liberal staffer.
Mr Lehrmann stays an harmless man beneath the regulation, as he was by no means convicted earlier than the trial collapsed following an allegation of juror misconduct.
It’s a discovering on the conduct of the police and the Workplace of Director of Public Prosecutions.
It will be significant nevertheless, due to the unique firestorm of publicity sparked by the Moller report which was a police doc detailing investigators’ issues in regards to the case.
“Probably the most senior police officer on the Brittany Higgins case believed there was inadequate proof to prosecute Bruce Lehrmann however couldn’t cease the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions from continuing as a result of ‘there may be an excessive amount of political interference’, based on diary notes made by the ACT Police Supervisor of Legal Investigations, Detective Superintendent Scott Moller,’’ The Australian reported on December 3, 2022.
Nevertheless, Walter Sofronoff SC finds that there was adequate proof to prosecute and that the ACT DPP was right to prosecute.
The police revealed on the inquiry that the political interference they had been referring to was not about politicians pushing for a cost in any respect however the normal media panorama and public curiosity.
Even Mr Moller additionally instructed the inquiry that regardless of the contents of the Moller report, he was finally satisfied by Mr Drumgold’s arguments for why there was a correct foundation to prosecute primarily based on the proof the police had collated.
Report finds Drumgold ‘knowingly lied’
The report finds Mr Drumgold, “knowingly lied” to the ACT Supreme Courtroom over his purported warning to Lisa Wilkinson over her Logies speech, based on a landmark inquiry.
The probe into Bruce Lehrmann’s trial, led by Walter Sofronoff KC, discovered proof of unethical conduct by Drumgold, together with his use of a word regarding a dialogue he held with Ms Wilkinson simply days earlier than her speech.
The inquiry report states that the findings in opposition to Mr Drumgold are so severe that Mr Sofronoff thought of whether or not he ought to invite the DPP to make a submission as as to whether he was a match and correct particular person to carry that workplace.
Finally, he decided it was not in his phrases of reference.
Mr Sofronoff accuses him of failing to reveal materials to the defence when he should have finished so.
“Mr Drumgold saved the defence at the hours of darkness about steps he was taking to disclaim them the paperwork,” Mr Sofronoff stated.
“Legal litigation shouldn’t be a poker recreation during which a prosecutor can conceal the playing cards.”
Mr Drumgold stays on depart from his job and has not returned to work since his bruising proof on the Sofronoff inquiry in Could.
The inquiry finds the police “carried out their duties in absolute good religion, with nice willpower though confronted with obstacles, and put collectively a sound case”.
Curse of the Logies
Ms Wilkinson’s Logies speech sparked a four-month delay to the trial, and the Chief Justice’s stern criticism of Ms Wilkinson contributed to a firestorm of adversarial publicity.
Mr Sofronoff has discovered Mr Drumgold “knowingly lied to the Chief Justice” a few warning he gave to not give the speech.
“For the Chief Justice’s functions, the word was not contemporaneous,’’ the report states.
“I reject {that a} prudent and skilled barrister would behave in that manner or make a mistake of this calibre.
“It is a wholly untenable excuse for a barrister of the seniority and expertise of Mr Drumgold.”
Mr Sofronoff rejected Mr Drumgold’s insistence this was an sincere mistake.
“He will need to have identified that (Chief Justice) McCallum had discovered, as a matter of reality, that Ms Wilkinson had engaged in wilful defiance of his ‘applicable’ warning and that her discovering was primarily based totally on the proofing word,’’ the report states.
Mr Sofronoff writes that Ms Wilkinson was a really skilled broadcaster who ought to have been cautious about making such a speech given the proximity of the trial, however nonetheless, the DPP had a accountability to the courtroom.
“As an alternative, he did nothing and thereby left alive a menace to the trial,’’ he stated.
Disclosure
Mr Sofronoff finds the DPP deserted the “golden rule” of disclosure and the apply of skilled prosecutors that “if unsure, disclose”.
The Sofronoff inquiry finds that Mr Drumgold repeatedly tried to make sure the so-called Moller Report stayed out of the fingers of the defence, regardless of the very fact they had been legally entitled to it.
“Mr Drumgold couldn’t title a supply (for the privilege declare) in his directions to his workers member as a result of, as Mr Drumgold admitted in his proof, he himself was the supply,’’ the report finds.
Mr Drumgold is accused of utilizing “dishonest means to stop an individual he was prosecuting from lawfully acquiring materials”.
The report additionally finds Mr Drumgold’s speech after the trial collapsed implied he “personally believed Ms Higgins’ grievance of rape was true and that, as a consequence, Mr Lehrmann was responsible”.
Mr Sofronoff finds this was additionally improper conduct on behalf of the DPP.
Initially revealed as ACT Director of Public Prosecutions Shane Drumgold has resigned
