John Button (campaigner)

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John Button, born in Liverpool, England on 9 February, 1944, is a Western Australian who was the victim of a significant miscarriage of justice.

Justice for Button and Beamish: Darryl Beamish Estelle Blackburn and John Button at the Supreme Court celebrating Beamish's exoneration on 1 April 2005 (44 years after conviction), following Button's exoneration on 25 February 2002 (39 years after conviction).

1 Conviction
2 Vindication
3 See Also
4 Bibliography
5 External links

[edit] Conviction

Button was wrongfully convicted of the manslaughter, by vehicle impact, of his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, in 1963. Charged with wilful murder, for which he could have been executed, the jury's lesser conviction of manslaughter brought him a sentence of 10 years imprisonment, of which he served 5 years in Fremantle Prison and Karnet Prison Farm, before being paroled. The serial killer, Eric Edgar Cooke, confessed to the murder of Anderson when arrested and also when on death row, including immediately before his execution, at which point he swore on a Bible that he was the offender. Cooke was, coincidentally, held on the segregated Death Row in Fremantle Prison before his execution, while Button and Darryl Beamish (also falsely convicted of a murder perpetrated by Cooke) were incarcerated in Fremantle Prison, in Main Division.

[edit] Vindication

The Western Australian Police and the courts persistently refused to believe Cooke's confession. Several appeals to courts or for ministerial intervention were unsuccessful. In 1998, the Western Australian journalist, Estelle Blackburn, advanced the cause of Button's vindication through her work Broken Lives (see Bibliography). This book's publication and the momentum developed among justice advocates during its writing were sufficient to break the impasse and put the matter before the courts again.

In 2002, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed Button's conviction after evidence from vehicle crash experts proved that Cooke was most likely the culprit. Button now spearheads the Western Australian Innocence Project which aims to free the wrongfully convicted.