Walter Sofronoff case: ACT is putting itself above the law

The ironic conclusion to be drawn from the latest attempts by the ACT government to besmirch the reputation of independently minded eminent jurist Walter Sofronoff KC is that in the nation’s capital, the integrity commission lacks integrity of its own. The Territory is seeking to block a review of the ACT Integrity Commission’s findings regarding an investigation into disgraced former director of public prosecutions Shane Drumgold because, it argues, the commission has parliamentary privilege.

This argument is one of a scoundrel administration that puts itself above the law. It means, as Janet Albrechtsen wrote on Wednesday, that a bunch of politicians is telling a citizen facing serious findings of corrupt conduct by a quasi-judicial body that those findings can’t be challenged in a real court of law.

The citizen in this case is Mr Sofronoff, who conducted the inquiry that found Mr Drumgold committed gross misconduct in the rape trial of Bruce Lehrmann, disgracefully breaching his responsibility to ensure the fair administration of justice and in the process betraying the public and his own staff. The inquiry found Mr Drumgold lied to ACT Chief Justice Lucy McCallum and failed in his duty to advise TV presenter Lisa Wilkinson against giving a Logies speech that consequently would delay Mr Lehrmann’s trial. The investigation found that Mr Drumgold “deliberately advanced a false claim of legal professional privilege” and “tried to use dishonest means to prevent a person he was prosecuting from lawfully obtaining material”. The latter was particularly egregious. Mr Sofronoff found Mr Drumgold was guilty of a “serious breach of duty” by failing to comply with the “golden rule” of disclosure that was at the heart of a fair trial.

Mr Drumgold won a small victory when ACT Supreme Court Acting Justice Stephen Kaye found that Mr Sofronoff’s conduct during his inquiry into Mr Drumgold’s prosecution of Mr Lehrmann gave rise to “a reasonable apprehension of bias” because of his communications with journalists, including this newspaper’s Albrechtsen. This resulted in an ACT Integrity Commission investigation that found Mr Sofronoff guilty of corrupt conduct.

The suspicion of the ACT government actions, from the conduct of the Lehrmann trial to the calling of the Sofronoff review and appointment of an integrity commission probe, is that it was all supposed to be a political stitch-up with a predetermined end. But, as it turned out, Mr Sofronoff was more thorough than the ACT government expected him to be. He deserves his day in court to clear his name.