Stephen Cordner
Stephen Cordner AM is emeritus professor of forensic medicine at Monash University and was the founding director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. He is co-author with Kerry Breen of Wrongful Convictions in Australia: Addressing issues in the criminal justice system (2023).
Stephen's recent articles
12 September 2025
NSW AG based Kathleen Folbigg’s compo on ‘no state malfeasance’, but no one has looked
When baby Azaria Chamberlain’s matinee jacket was found at Uluru in 1986, it led to the prompt release of her mother, Lindy Chamberlain, from prison.
13 August 2025
Grossly inadequate compensation offered to Kathleen Folbigg
On 5 June 2023, Kathleen Folbigg was released from prison following 20 years of imprisonment after having been wrongfully convicted of killing her four children over a 10-year period.
10 July 2025
Who wants to serve on a jury? Is the jury system still the best we can do?
You may have been following the current criminal trial in Victoria where a woman is accused of murdering three people by serving them a meal laced with death cap mushrooms.
2 March 2025
Can Kathleen Folbigg ever be adequately compensated for her wrongful conviction?
In 2023 Kathleen Folbigg was pardoned and released after 20 years of wrongful imprisonment; soon after, her convictions were quashed by the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal. There remain two further actions before this sorry saga can be declared closed: (a) the awarding of proper compensation and (b) a full inquiry, best done by a Royal Commission, into what really went wrong. Folbigg’s legal team is pursuing compensation. On what has been made public so far, there is little likelihood of a full inquiry and so yet again the criminal justice system will not learn from its mistakes.
27 December 2024
Another wrongful conviction? UK nurse Lucy Letby may be a scapegoat for an under-funded NHS
In August 2023, nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of the murder of seven babies and attempted murder of six babies in the neonatal unit of a UK National Health Service (NHS) hospital. The Australian media has reported on the current instalment of the saga (viz. a judicial inquiry into conditions at the hospital where Letby worked).
19 June 2024
Why is Australia’s criminal justice system so resistant to change?
How many more wrongful convictions does Australia have to have before state and federal attorneys-general and senior members of the legal profession agree that they must address this serious problem?
21 December 2023
Kathleen Folbigg’s wrongful convictions: Quashed, but why did they happen?
The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal has adopted the findings of the inquiry of the Honorable Thomas Bathurst AC KC into the convictions of Ms Kathleen Folbigg. As a result, her five criminal convictions from 2003 have been quashed and she has been acquitted.
28 September 2023
Absence of systematic compensation for wrongful convictions compounds the injustice
Commentators have sought to predict what level of compensation Kathleen Folbigg will receive for her twenty years of wrongful imprisonment. None have asked a more important question: is it possible to adequately compensate a wrongfully convicted person for all the harms that are now known to ensue from prolonged incarceration?
5 July 2023
Miscarriages of justice: Kathleen Folbigg is one of an unknown number of people wrongly convicted
Most Australians have little idea how frequently miscarriages of justice in the form of wrongful convictions occur in Australia. This lack of knowledge should be no surprise; not even our criminal justice system tracks such data let alone researches the possibility of wrongful convictions. In the absence of data, most people, including many in the criminal justice system, see instances of wrongful convictions such as those of Lindy Chamberlain and Kathleen Folbigg as rare aberrations.
13 June 2023
The wrongful conviction of Kathleen Folbigg: why did it happen and what must be done to stop it from happening again?
It is 41 years since Lindy Chamberlain was convicted for a non-existent crime, spent nearly five years in prison, and had her family life destroyed.
15 November 2021
It's not forensic rocket science: why we need a Criminal Cases Review Commission
An independent review body will buttress the courts, remedying miscarriages of justice by deciphering often complex expert evidence.