Lawyer condemns $1.3M compensation for woman wrongfully imprisoned for 20 years

Kathleen Folbigg (right) with her best friend Tracy Chapman leave a court in Sydney (Dec 2023)

An Australian state government’s decision to pay 2 million Australian dollars ($1.3 million) compensation to a woman who spent 20 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of killing her four children was condemned by her lawyer yesterday as “profoundly unjust.”

New South Wales Attorney-General Michael Daley said that Kathleen Folbigg’s lawyers had been told the sum the 58-year-old would be paid more than two years after she was released from prison.

Daley did not make the figure public, but Folbigg’s supporters confirmed the sum.

“The decision follows thorough and extensive consideration of the materials and issues raised in Ms. Folbigg’s application (for compensation) and provided by her legal representatives,” Daley said in a statement. The government declined further comment.

Folbigg’s lawyer, Rhanee Rego, described the sum as a “profoundly unjust figure” and “hugely insulting.”

“Her (Folbigg’s) reaction is really that it feels, well — we all feel that it’s profoundly unjust,” Rego told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

“When you look at the other comparison cases and take into account what she has endured: she lost her four children; she has spent two decades in jail; vilified as Australia’s worst female serial killer,” Rego added.

While Folbigg has no legal avenue to appeal Daley’s decision, Rego said she supported a lawmaker’s call for an inquiry into how Daley reached the figure.

Rego didn’t put a figure on appropriate compensation, but said it should be “substantially higher.”

“I was very much hopeful that it would be substantially more because this is one of our worst wrongful conviction cases in Australia,” Rego said.

In December 2023, the New South Wales Court of Appeal overturned all convictions against Folbigg, 20 years after a jury found her guilty of killing her four children.

Folbigg had already been pardoned at the state government’s direction months earlier and released from prison based on new scientific evidence that her four children may have died from natural causes as she had always insisted.

The pardon was seen as the quickest way of getting Folbigg out of prison after an inquiry into the new evidence recommended the appeals court consider quashing her convictions.

The inquiry that recommended Folbigg’s pardon and acquittal was prompted by a petition signed in 2021 by 90 scientists, medical practitioners and related professionals who argued that significant new evidence showed the children likely died of natural causes.

Her first child, Caleb, was born in 1989 and died 19 days later in what a jury determined to be the lesser crime of manslaughter. Her second child, Patrick, was 8 months old when he died in 1991. Two years later, Sarah died at 10 months. In 1999, Folbigg’s fourth child, Laura, died at 19 months.

Prosecutors argued Folbigg smothered them. She was convicted in 2003 and sentenced to 30 years in prison on three counts of murder and one of manslaughter.

Folbigg’s friend since childhood, Tracy Chapman, described the compensation sum as “disgraceful.”

She said Folbigg was unemployed and living alone with her dog Snowy in rental accommodation in the city of Newcastle. Chapman said Folbigg was “pretty much rocking in a corner” in reaction to the news and unable to speak to the media.

“Kath’s on ongoing mental health support that she needs for the rest of her days,” Chapman said.

“She’s got to deal with the trauma of the loss of the four kids that was never done properly during 20 years wrongfully convicted in prison, the legal process and all the trauma that was attached to it as well as then living day to day in a world that has changed so much,” Chapman added.

Chapman said Folbigg had told her she was “deeply sad and there is no empathy here.”

“When I spoke to her she just said: ‘Trace, the sad thing here is I’m not surprised,’” Chapman said, using an abbreviated form of Tracy. ROD McGUIRK, MELBOURNE, MDT/AP