Linus Patrick Driscoll was arrested in Melbourne at a quarter to seven on Friday 5 July 1974. He was wanted in Sydney for the murder of John "Jake" Maloney, who had been shot twice in the back of the head in a house at Revesby on 24 November 1972. Three years later, the case he fought became one of the leading judgments in Australian law on the police "verbal".
Who was Jimmy the Pom?
Driscoll was an Englishman whom Sydney knew as Jimmy the Pom. In 2020 a New South Wales coroner named him among the four men "believed to have been" in the Toe Cutters, alongside Jake Maloney, Billy Maloney and Kevin Gore. Read who the Toe Cutters were.
When the Victorian police arrested him, they found guns at the house he was living in at 9 Kent Street, Prahran: a .32 Browning automatic, a .303 rifle, a sawn-off shotgun and a .22 machine pistol. "They are just tools of trade," he was later recorded as saying. They also found a notebook with photographs of two Sydney men. One of them was Johnny Regan, the Magician.
The verbal
That night his Sydney solicitor, Colin Heazlewood, flew to Melbourne to be with him. At the airport he met the Sydney detective, Noel Morey, and asked to be present at any interview. Morey refused, and they gave different accounts of the conversation. Forty minutes after Heazlewood landed, the questioning began at Russell Street without him.
What came out of that night, and a second interview in Sydney, were typed records of interview that Driscoll never signed. The police said he answered the questions and refused to sign. Driscoll said he said nothing at all and that every answer was made up. The Sydney record was a full confession.
In 1970s New South Wales an unsigned record was not a weakness in a case. Defence lawyers called it the verbal: a record of questions and answers that needed only a typewriter and two detectives who would swear to the same story. As the Chief Justice of Australia would later note, the practice of putting such records before juries had "grown apace" in the state since the 1960s.
The first trial
Driscoll was tried in the Supreme Court at Darlinghurst in February 1975, defended by Tony Bellanto. The judge heard Heazlewood's account of the airport with the jury out of the room and ruled it out. The jury never heard it. They heard the records read aloud, and about the other guns from Prahran, and were out for an hour. Life imprisonment was mandatory. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his appeal three to nil.
The High Court
The High Court of Australia heard his application in Sydney on 28 April 1977. Five judges sat: Chief Justice Sir Garfield Barwick, Sir Harry Gibbs, Sir Anthony Mason, Kenneth Jacobs and Lionel Murphy. Judgment came on 10 August 1977.
Justice Gibbs accepted that the Crown's case had been substantial. But the other guns should never have gone before the jury, and the jury should have heard Heazlewood. Then he went to the heart of the matter. "The mere existence of a record is no safeguard against perjury," he wrote. "If the police officers are prepared to give false testimony as to what the accused said, it may be expected that they will not shrink from compiling a false document as well." There were other methods, he suggested, "such as tape recording, or the use of video-tape", which "would not be open to the same objection".
The Chief Justice was not yet convinced that recording machines were "either desirable or practicable". The court's order was short: the conviction and sentence were quashed, and there was to be a new trial.
Not guilty
The retrial opened on 21 November 1977 in No. 5 Court at Darlinghurst before Justice David Yeldham, with Bill Job QC for the Crown. This time the jury heard Heazlewood. Against the advice of all his lawyers, Driscoll gave evidence and was cross-examined for hours. Bellanto fell ill, and his junior, Bill Hosking, made the final address, for more than three hours.
The jury was out for sixty-five minutes. The foreman's answer, as Hosking remembered it, came "in a firm, clear voice": not guilty. The Sydney Morning Herald's headline the next morning was "New jury acquits man of murder".
Driscoll did not walk free. He was sent back to Victoria to serve a sentence for the guns at Kent Street, and was deported to Britain in 1979. On any record that can be checked, he stands convicted of nothing that happened at Revesby.
After the case
Hosking told the story in his memoir Justice Denied (2017). Driscoll and his wife sent him a thank-you card that Christmas. Hosking still has it, and unlike the records of interview, it is signed.
The legend kept growing without him. Chopper Read claimed him as his teacher, and stories put him in places the records show he could not have been. Read how Chopper Read borrowed the Pom's legend.
The full story
The Toe Cutters by Ben Scott tells the night at Revesby, the arrest, both trials and the High Court appeal in full, from the judgment, the papers of the time and the memoir of the barrister who won the case.