Veteran crime fighter John McKechnie may appear supremely confident in his career’s work, but he admits to losing sleep over the possibility of being wrong.
Speaking about his legal life on the eve of his retirement after a decade as the state’s Corruption and Crime Commission chief, Mr McKechnie believes society has many pieces of unfinished business to resolve but police corruption is not one of them in this state.
“I do not see the corruption in the police force that I saw in my early career, for a whole variety of reasons,” Mr McKechnie said.
“I think the police are more professional now, quite frankly, among other things.
“But if you ask me, what keeps me awake at night?
“What if I’m wrong?”
The underlying challenge of police corruption is one Mr McKechnie feels has changed significantly in this state, notably since the 1990s, long before he became CCC commissioner.
“During the 1970s and 1980s, there were pockets, significant pockets of corruption in the police force, partly for a number of reasons,” Mr McKechnie told Business News, highlighting the arrival of drugs, the policy of containment for prostitution and, to a lesser degree, the toleration of illegal gaming houses.
“You can design-out corruption pretty well.
“One of the design-outs was, oddly, the casino, another was the Prostitution Act in 2000.
“What happened in the early 1990s was that the police commissioner, for the first time, didn’t come from the detectives; he came from the east, Bob Falconer. In fact, no commissioner since then has come from the detectives.
“Previously, they all came from the detectives.”
But corruption exists in plenty of nooks and crannies, as Mr McKechnie’s CCC has discovered in its examination of political and bureaucratic systems.
“Misconduct in Western Australia is more widespread than I had expected when I joined the CCC,” Mr McKechnie writes in his book, My Life in Crime, which launches in July.
The commission can only investigate a tiny number of the 5,000 allegations a year, he writes, with most dealt with by agencies. This is an appropriate outcome, Mr McKechnie suggests, with the CCC choosing to investigate cases involving wider issues of governance for the public sector.
“What surprised me was the nature and number of credible allegations of misconduct,” he writes.
“Examination of CCC reports over twenty years shows instances of corruption and misconduct in almost every facet of government.”
He believes it is an ongoing problem that demands constant vigilance.
“My view is that the forces of good may never win the battle against corruption,” Mr McKechnie said.
“But if they stop fighting, evil will undoubtedly triumph.
“The battle requires commitment from every honest citizen.”
In the five decades since his admission as a legal practitioner in 1974, Mr McKechnie has seen sweeping changes to many of the customs of the profession, as well as the community that it serves.
While he welcomes the demystifying of the courts, Mr McKechnie bemoans that lawyers started to charge by the hour; a practice that started after he joined the Crown Solictor’s office, which meant he never ‘time cost’ as those in private practice do today.
He also thinks the opportunities for young lawyers to learn advocacy in court have been reduced with the advent of infringement notices issued by police and the rise in specialist tribunals.
Mr McKechnie thinks the cost of going to court is too high for most people in the community, which puts the law out of reach.
He flags the intractable issues of domestic violence – cases that bookended his court career – and Indigenous incarceration as things he wishes he could change.
Part memoir, part a whimsical examination of quirky court stories from the past, My Life in Crime offers a window into the early life of a generation that is now stepping away from public life.
It was a boys’ own pre-television lifestyle of unlocked sleepouts, hockey, rugby, cadets, Scouts, Swan River adventures, crossing the Nullarbor on the unsealed Eyre Highway, and taking holiday breaks on the south coast. It also depicts a life seriously marred by the tragic passing of his older brother, Ranald, in a car accident.
Post-school, Mr McKechnie travelled by ship as a Rotary exchange student in the US, during the eventful year of 1968.
He attended The University of Western Australia, then the only choice for local law students, where he is self-deprecatingly describes an average academic performance and signals his early interest in the quirky stories that represent a big portion of common law.
My Life in Crime also describes the author’s journey through the legal profession, including several notable cases he dealt with as defence lawyer, prosecutor, King’s Counsel and WA Supreme Court Justice.
Others were simply notable at the time without a significant connection to the author.
This group includes three murderers who were sentenced to death row in 1980, 16 years after the last execution in WA. This led Mr McKechnie to revisit the case of serial killer Eric Edgar Cook, who is viewed by many of the era to have single-handedly changed Perth’s carefree culture, notably by prompting a large part of the population to lock their doors at night.
Of the three cases – Donald Irwin Parre, Brian William Edwards and Peter John Maloney – Mr McKechnie mentions but a passing involvement in the legal proceedings of Parre.
As a newcomer at the Crown Solicitor’s office, Mr McKechnie won a judgment (including an award of costs) against Parre, a Mount Barker farmer who might be described these days as a ‘sovereign citizen’. It was an attempt by the local bailiff-cum-constabulary to seize property to the value of that owed by the man that ultimately resulted in murder.
The challenge of the sentences was that WA had become an outlier in holding on to capital punishment, even if death sentences had been consistently commuted to life imprisonment by various governors since Cook’s execution in 1964.
It is notable that the abhorrence of capital punishment had outweighed that associated with the individual’s acts in the public discourse, with pressure from these cases leading to a new sentencing regime called strict security life imprisonment.
Four years later, the death sentence was abolished.
That is just one of the more serious subjects highlighted in the book, documenting criminal cases Mr McKechnie was involved with at different stages of his career from lawyer to the judiciary, often with helpful explanations of legal terminology for the layperson.
Chapters such as ‘Constitutional Law and the High Court’, document numerous appearances before the highest court in the land; ‘Domestic Violence’; and, perhaps expressing that nexus of criminality and corruption outline in what became WA Inc, ‘Rothwells Ltd’ all have a very serious side.
It could be suggested that writing quirky cases gave the author an outlet from the either the dreary or disturbing material he faced most days.
Legal lore meets motley crew
JOHN McKechnie’s book, My Life in Crime, is not intended as a humourous read, but its pithy case studies of criminal cases do offer a quirky reflection of past life and times.
There were the shipwrecked sailors who tried to claim murdering a cabin boy to eat him was a reasonable act, under the circumstances.
Or what about the woman who successfully sued because a company offered £100 if anyone caught the flu after using preventative concoction.
The punchline is not always in the judgement, as Mr McKechnie often finds by researching the aftermath or finding a strange historical link. The woman above not only won her £100, a fortune back in 1893, but she actually died of influenza 40 years later.
Both were law school cases that began Mr McKechnie’s journey into the unusual or interesting tales in case law, many of which he wrote about for the WA Law Society’s regular publication, Brief.
What the one about the magistrate who steps into the witness box? Well that’s happened more than once, actually.
How about the lawyer who met an untimely death jumping from a Tiger Moth biplane in an attempt to save his drifting yacht from a reef off Rottnest?
Or the pregnant woman who was refused embarkation on the SS Kanowna bound from Adelaide to Perth because the contract of carriage provided that the captain could refuse to carry a passenger who was dangerously ill.
Mr McKechnie hints that South Australia’s chief justice at the time, Sir James Way, may have had less knowledge of the “illness of pregnancy” than for males in general.
“He did not marry until he was sixty-two,” Mr McKechnie wrote of the judge who found for the shipping line, which was forced to defend an appeal by the passenger.
“His wife was forty-four and had an adult family.”
About a third of Mr McKechnie’s 350 pages are these odd tales, many set in earlier times, which highlight the absurdity of human behaviour, the arguments people make and the various results of that in court.
