AUSTRALIA: MAN EXECUTED FOR MURDER 90 YEARS AGO PARDONED

the Victorian State Government in Australia created legal history when it announced a posthumous pardon for a man wrongly executed 86 years ago in the notorious Gun Alley murder case. Colin Campbell Ross was hanged in 1922 after he was convicted of raping and killing Alma Tirtschke, 12. He went to the gallows maintaining his innocence. The pardon follows an unprecedented inquiry by Victorian Supreme Court judges Bernard Teague, Phil Cummins and John Coldrey, who found Ross was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. "This is a tragic case where a miscarriage of justice resulted in a man being hanged," Attorney-General Rob Hulls said. In 1995 researcher Kevin Morgan found the evidence used to convict Ross, hairs said to come from the victim's scalp, in an archive. In 1998, the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine found the hairs were not from the same scalp. A second test by Australian Federal Police confirmed that the key evidence was wrong.