Regarding Mr Selby’s sentence:

“You should ask: “If I or someone I care about is falsely accused and convicted in Tasmania, what will the major party politicians, police, prosecutors and parole people do about it?””

I think that Mr Selby’s question assumes the very thing that remains to be demonstrated.

Of course, if I or someone I cared about were falsely accused and wrongfully convicted, I would want politicians, police, prosecutors and the justice system to take credible evidence of that wrongful conviction extremely seriously.

But the important question in the Neill-Fraser case is whether she was, in fact, wrongfully convicted. Describing her conviction as a “wrongful conviction” does not establish that proposition.

I would therefore phrase the question differently:

If I or someone I care about is convicted of a serious crime, and later claim that the conviction was wrongful, what mechanisms are available in Tasmania to examine credible new evidence, and are those mechanisms adequate and genuinely independent?

That question does not presuppose either Susan Neill-Fraser’s guilt or innocence. It addresses the important systemic issue that I think Mr Selby is trying to raise without first assuming the conclusion that remains in dispute.

As Mr Selby is fully aware, Tasmania does have a specific mechanism for dealing with new evidence after ordinary appeal rights have been exhausted. In 2015 Parliament introduced s 402A of the Criminal Code, allowing a second or subsequent appeal where there is fresh and compelling evidence capable of establishing a substantial miscarriage of justice. Ms Neill-Fraser has already used that mechanism: she obtained leave to bring a second appeal, her claimed fresh evidence was examined by the Court of Criminal Appeal, and her appeal was dismissed by a 2–1 majority in 2021. Nor does that necessarily close the door: if genuinely new evidence now emerges that satisfies the statutory requirements, s 402A permits an application for a subsequent appeal.

The relevant question, therefore, is not what authorities would do if we simply assume someone has been wrongfully convicted, but what fresh and compelling evidence exists today that has not already been judicially considered.

For the benefit of readers who come across comments here or elsewhere by P. Lozo about the conviction of Sue Neill-Fraser please note:
1. The multiple problems with the police investigation in 2009/2010, the conduct of the trial and the most recent appeal, and the conduct of police post trial, are set out, with detailed referencing, in the two sets of Etter/Selby papers tabled in the Tasmanian Legislative Council in 2021 and 2025. The link to the 2025 papers is given in the article above. Here is the link to the August 2021 paper https://www.parliament.tas.gov.au/legislative-council/tabled-papers/2021-50th-parliament/LCTP14_31_08_2021.pdf ;
2. The content of these papers when compared with P. Lozo’s comments reveals that he has a tendency to make comments that mislead. Why he does so is a matter for him.
3. The legal framework for asserting that a conviction should be overturned as unsafe ( ie. a wrongful conviction) is discussed at the start of the 2025 paper. It is essential to grasp that convictions must be based upon evidence at the level of beyond reasonable doubt. Where there is a reasonable alternative hypothesis then that level of proof cannot be reached. This is a framework that P. Lozo disregards. It is not clear if that disregard is inadvertent or not. That too is a matter for him.

The interesting paradoxical problem for Etter & Selby to address can be stated as follows:

Given the known timing conflicts, if Vass could not have been aboard Four Winds at the time a grey dinghy was first spotted alongside the port side of Four Winds, does this mean that someone else was there in a grey dinghy—and that whoever was there subsequently returned to shore to pick up Vass and transport her across a very choppy river? Or was the dinghy actually Sue’s dinghy, but perceived from a distance and across the water as being a shade of grey?

Given that Conde and his two passengers provided significantly different descriptions of the same dinghy, is it more appropriate to consider their descriptions collectively, including the inconsistencies between them, or to place particular weight on the description given by one individual over those of the other two?

The 2025 Etter & Selby report contains the following paragraph on page 36:

“An adequate investigation would have shown each of the ‘dinghy observers’ an array of such boats, including the yacht’s Zodiac (rubber) dinghy. Each observer would then have been asked which, if any, met their recollections. That didn’t happen.”

It is not obvious to me whether Etter & Selby are suggesting that the observers should have been shown an array of dinghies in real life and at close range (a few metres away) or whether the dinghies should have been viewed under conditions similar to those in which the “dinghy observers” originally saw them. For example, Paul Conde said that he observed the dinghy from about 50 yards away.

Etter & Selby appear not to appreciate that it is not only the distance from the observer to the dinghy that matters. The viewing geometry, particularly the position of the sun relative to the observer, the dinghy and the water, can also matter considerably. Under one viewing geometry, a white dinghy will appear to be white to the majority of observers. Under a different viewing geometry, the same white dinghy will appear to be a shade of grey to the majority of the observers. This depends on factors including the relative amount of light reaching the observer’s eyes from the dinghy and from the surrounding water. In other words, the position of the sun relative to the direction in which the observer is looking will substantially affect the perceived appearance of the dinghy because that will determine the amount of light reflected from the water towards the observer. See my comment about the grey dinghy on  28 March 2026 at 12:26 pm : https://citynews.com.au/2026/rotten-to-its-core-no-saying-sorry-in-tasmanian-justice/

Had Etter & Selby taken note of what the prosecution had been saying, what Peter Powell had been saying, and what I have been saying since 2015, they could have gone to their local beach and tested this proposition for themselves.

I conducted my own simple test some years ago. I went to my local beach and observed a white boat. I then walked along the beach until I was viewing the same boat from a sufficiently different geometrical perspective. From that position, the boat appeared grey. I took a photograph from each viewing position. I should point out that the effect recorded by my camera is significantly more pronounced than what is perceived by the human visual system, so photographs should not necessarily be treated as exact representations of human visual perception. The two photos are shown on my FB

FB https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1VuxCqvtVb/

Neill-Fraser’s supporters, including Etter and Selby, could therefore conduct a simple test for themselves to answer the question: can a white dinghy appear grey when viewed from approximately 50 metres away across a body of water under the relevant viewing geometry and lighting conditions?

I will finish with one further point. Since a white dinghy will appear to a human observer to be grey under the relevant viewing conditions, then blue stripes on that dinghy will appear as a darker shade of grey than the rest of the dinghy. From approximately 50 metres away, an observer might therefore perceive a predominantly grey dinghy with darker markings and potentially describe it as “scruffy-looking”.