Police Interviews and Coerced False Confessions: Gibson v Western Australia (2017) 51 WAR 199

Police interviews of suspects"guilt-presumptive" and are designed to extract a confession. In 2012, in a remote community in outback Australia, police interviewed a 21-year-old illiterate indigenous man whose first language was not English. After he appeared to make an incriminating statement, Gene Gibson was charged with a murder alleged to have been committed two years earlier. During a pre-trial hearing, Mr Gibson successfully challenged the voluntariness of two interviews with police. Notwithstanding the rejection of the interviews with police, following the advice of his solicitor, Mr Gibson pleaded guilty to manslaughter. In August 2014, an agreed statement of facts described how Mr Gibson had been "very drunk" when he was driving a stolen car and passed Joshua Warneke walking alongside the road. Mr Gibson agreed that he stopped the vehicle and approached Mr Warneke from behind and struck him on the head with a metal implement. In October 2014, Mr Gibson was sentenced to seven years and six months' imprisonment. In April 2017, the Western Australian Supreme Court of Appeal concluded that a miscarriage of justice had occurred and set aside the conviction. This article examines the detailed reasoning of the decisions of the pre-trial application and the Court of Appeal and considers police interviewing techniques and the typology of false confessions.