Andrew Mallard

Andrew Mark Mallard (born 16 August 1962) is a British-born Western Australian who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1995 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released from prison in 2006 after his conviction was quashed by the High Court of Australia.

Mallard had been convicted of the murder of Pamela Lawrence, a business proprietor, who was killed at her shop, on 23 May 1994. The evidence used in Mallard's trial was scanty and obscure, and it was later revealed that police withheld vital information from his defence team. Almost twelve years later, after an appeal to the High Court, his conviction was quashed, and a retrial ordered. However, the charges against him were dropped and Mallard was released. At the time, the Director of Public Prosecutions stated that Andrew Mallard remained the prime suspect and that if further evidence became available he could still be prosecuted.

In 2006 police conducted a review of the investigation and subsequently a cold case review. As a result, they uncovered sufficiently compelling evidence to charge convicted murderer Simon Rochford with the murder of Pamela Lawrence and to eliminate Andrew Mallard as a person of interest. After being publicly named as a suspect, Simon Rochford was found dead in his cell in Albany Prison, having committed suicide.

The Western Australian Commission on Crime and Corruption investigated whether there was misconduct by any public officer (police, prosecutors or Members of Parliament) associated with this case and made findings against two policemen and a senior prosecutor.

A book about the case, Murderer No More: Andrew Mallard and the Epic Fight that Proved his Innocence was written by Colleen Egan, the journalist who campaigned on Mallard's behalf for eight years. It was published by Allen & Unwin in June 2010.

Mallard was convicted chiefly on two pieces of evidence. The first was a set of police notes of interviews with Mallard during which, the police claimed, he had confessed. These notes had not been signed by Mallard. The second was a video recording of the last twenty minutes of Mallard's eleven hours of interviews. The video shows Mallard speculating as to how the murderer might have killed Pamela Lawrence; police claimed that, although it was given in third-person, it was a confession.

Mallard had no history of violence; no murder weapon had been found. No blood was found on Mallard, despite the violence of the murder and the crime scene being covered with it, nor was DNA evidence produced. He was convicted on the confessions purportedly given during unrecorded interviews and the partial video-recording of an interview. Despite this, Mallard's appeal to the Supreme Court of Western Australia in 1996 was dismissed.

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