Former doctor Graeme Reeves “released” from his crimes
Friday, 27 December 2013
SYDNEY: Victims of the disgraced ‘Butcher of Bega’, Graeme Stephen REEVES, have angrily attacked the decision by the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions to abandon 61 pending criminal charges against the former obstetrician and gynaecologist, who was found guilty of maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm and financial deception in 2011. Medical Error Action Group spokeswoman Lorraine Long said that because of the DPP’s outrageous decision it is very likely that the “Butcher of Baulkham Hills and Bega” will walk free from his NSW jail in coming days.
Miss Long said a massive NSW Police Force “Strike Force Tarella”, costing taxpayers millions of dollars, put a brief containing 17 criminal charges to the DPP in September 2008 and a further 52 charges in December 2009. Sixty-nine charges were formally laid against Reeves but 61 have lain dormant in the court system for years without any action from the DPP. Miss Long said that shortly before Christmas she learned that not only would all the pending criminal charges laid against Reeves be dropped but that Reeves would soon be released from prison after having served his sentence for the only four offences on which he has stood trial and been convicted.
“What are the victims of criminally incompetent doctors in our medical system meant to conclude from this decision? That there’s one law for doctors and another for any other type of criminal? I challenge the DPP to publicly explain why they have made this decision to abandon all outstanding charges. Nothing has changed in the evidence since brave women and bereaved families came forward to help police investigate one of the most appalling criminals in New South Wales medical history”, Miss Long said.
Today Miss Long accused the NSW Government of slashing the DPP’s budget so severely that prosecutors had been forced to abandon one of the most high-profile prosecutions of a doctor in recent decades. Interested journalists had approached police and the DPP in the past year to try to get answers on why the remaining charges had not been proceeded with; no answer was ever given.
“There is now a price on justice because of budget cuts to the Prosecution service in New South Wales. The DPP clearly believed there was sufficient evidence when police laid the original 17 charges that Reeves stood a reasonable chance of conviction if and when the cases came to trial.”
“There is no valid evidential reason why these charges are being abandoned – just a cold, cynical, decision by the DPP. Nothing has changed with this evidence of clear criminal conduct. The women who were raped, who were physically abused and damaged, rendered infertile, genitally mutilated, and who lost their babies to this man will never have the opportunity to see justice done in the New South Wales courts. I ask why?”
Miss Long was especially critical of what she described as the cynical decision by the DPP to quietly drop all charges against Reeves during the holiday season – clearly in the hope that the bad news story would be missed by the media and the public.
“My organisation has spent the past 19½ years fighting the cosy relationship between the legal profession and the medical profession. Too often doctors have been treated excessively leniently by the Health Department, the oversight bodies such as health complaints commissions, Medical Boards and professional registration bodies such as the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. The Reeves case was an enormously symbolic step forward for New South Wales. Evidence Medical Error Action Group provided to police was of a shocking pattern of criminal assaults, cover-ups and failures inside the health system”, Lorraine Long said.
Miss Long said there was still a question mark over the case of the late Mrs Kerry McAllister, whom a NSW Coroner found in February 2013 had died in 1996 because of Reeves’ gross negligence. The Coroner’s Court heard that Reeves failed completely to respond adequately to Mrs McAllister’s post-natal infection after she gave birth to her third son in The Hills Private Hospital, Baulkham Hills. The evidence in the case raised the strong possibility that Reeves should be charged with manslaughter because of his refusal to assist Mrs McAllister despite the multiple concerns of hospital staff.
The victims Reeves harmed and the bereaved families of victims he killed suffer for the rest of their lives with inexplicable injustice by the perpetrator getting off so lightly and getting away with his long-running pattern of depravities and criminal behaviour.
“I hope that someone the NSW Government or the DPP loves never has to suffer in a New South Wales hospital because of the decision that the DPP has made today”, Lorraine Long said. “This decision to abandon charges against a notorious recidivist offender in the health system sends a terrible message to the medical professionals out there who take similar licence with their patients.”