Shortcut: Never To Be Released?

Summary

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Australian True Crime

Shortcut: Never To Be Released?

Release Date: January 25, 2026
Guest: Peter Breen, criminal lawyer, former NSW parliamentarian, author of Mistaken Identity or Stitch Up
Host: Meshel Laurie / Bravecasting

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Episode Overview

This episode investigates the controversial “cementing in” laws in New South Wales, introduced in response to shocking murders in the 1980s. With guest Peter Breen, the episode examines the fairness of sentencing young offenders to life without parole, the legitimacy of convictions in infamous cases (notably the Janine Balding and Anita Cobby murders), and the call for a Criminal Cases Review Commission in Australia. Peter Breen argues that some of those imprisoned may be innocent, and he highlights flaws in both investigative and legislative processes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Background: Cementing In Laws & Crime Cases

• (00:00–02:23)
  • The 1986 murder of Anita Cobby and 1988 murder of Janine Balding by groups of young offenders shocked Australia.
  • In response, NSW Parliament enacted laws to keep these offenders in prison for life without parole ("cementing them in").
  • Peter Breen criticizes these special, retrospective laws as an overreach by lawmakers into judicial territory:

    "I didn't think it was within the power of lawmakers to trespass into the jurisdiction of judges by passing special laws, especially retrospective laws, affecting these guys." – Peter Breen (01:31)

2. Mistaken Identity in the Janine Balding Case

• (02:49–06:49)
  • Focus on "Shorty" Jamison (Stephen Shorty Jamison): doubted presence at the crime.
  • All co-accused maintained Jamison’s innocence from the start.
  • Surprising anecdote: When Jamison was arrested, other accused laughed, saying police arrested "the wrong Shorty." Their identification pointed to a different individual, Shorty Wells.

    "The other four all laughed...and said, ha ha, you got the wrong Shorty." – Peter Breen (05:01)

  • Crucial error: a fabricated police record of interview, which presented Jamison as eloquent, though he had clear verbal limitations.

    "It's a narrative that you just can't imagine coming out of his mouth...he talks in two or three sentences, then stops." – Peter Breen (06:49)

  • For 37 years, co-accused have maintained Jamison’s innocence.

3. Echoes in the Anita Cobby Case

• (07:28–08:47)
  • Similarities between the Cobby and Balding cases: suspect police practices and questionable interview records.
  • Detective Kevin Rao linked to both cases; both involved statements alleged by Breen to be coerced.

    "I saw the name of the detective...who...signed the false record of interview in the Jamison case... so I kind of got stuck with both cases." – Peter Breen (07:40)

  • Notably, co-offenders in the Cobby case long insisted one of the convicted, Gary Murphy, was not present (mirroring Jamison’s situation).

4. Youth Sentencing & Life Imprisonment

• (08:47–12:13)
  • Discussion on whether juveniles should ever receive life sentences without parole.
  • Noting legislative change: A similar crime today would not result in life without parole.

    "It actually wouldn't happen if they committed the same crime today as juveniles." – Peter Breen (09:05)

  • Peter Breen emphasizes the lack of maturity and impulsiveness in juveniles.
  • Risks of such sentences:
    • Removes incentive for good behaviour in prison.
    • Can increase prison violence.
    • Is considered fundamentally unjust and inhumane if inmates cannot ever be released except due to terminal illness.

    "They can't get out of jail unless they get cancer... it's just, on some level, fundamentally unjust." – Peter Breen (11:43)

5. Danger of Wrongful Convictions & Need for Systemic Review

• (12:25–13:23)
  • Focus on potential innocence of Jamison and Gary Murphy.
  • Peter Breen advocates for a Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) in Australia to systematically investigate suspected miscarriages of justice:

    "It's a fully funded government body that has access to all the evidence... They're in every Commonwealth country except Australia... they've found over 500 people wrongly convicted in the UK as a result." – Peter Breen (12:42)

  • He estimates that 1-2% of prison populations are likely wrongly convicted.

6. Systemic & Moral Implications

• (13:23–14:14)
  • Critiques the utilitarian approach: keeping potentially innocent people imprisoned because of prior criminal records or to "protect" society.
  • Breen notes that case resolution has taken far too long — Jamison has been in jail for 37 years, and Breen has been working on the case for 25 years.

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Notable Quotes

• On legislative overreach:

  "No matter how terrible they were, they should be punished according to the punishments at the time of their crimes, not retrospectively."
  – Peter Breen (01:31)

• On Jamison's conviction:

  "It's a narrative that you just can't imagine coming out of his mouth."
  – Peter Breen (06:49)

• On youth sentencing:

  "It's difficult, but they're still children at the end of the day, and their brains haven't properly developed."
  – Peter Breen (09:16)

• On the need for review mechanisms:

  "Only a Criminal Cases Review Commission could get to the bottom of it without going through all the dramas...like, it's been 25 years since I've been involved in his case. 25 years. And, you know, he's been in jail for 37, so it's just too long."
  – Peter Breen (13:23)

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Timeline Highlights

• 00:00–02:23: Setup — Crimes, aftermath, introduction of "cementing in" laws
• 04:28–06:49: Mistaken identity details, fabricated interviews, co-accused allegations
• 07:28–08:47: Similarities between Cobby and Balding cases; questionable detective work
• 09:05–11:03: Debate on juvenile life sentences, behaviour in prison, system consequences
• 12:25–13:23: CCRC discussion, prevalence and tragedy of wrongful convictions

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Memorable Moments

• The image of the accused laughing at the police for arresting the wrong "Shorty" (05:01).
• The repeated insistence from both cases’ co-accused that innocent people were convicted.
• The discovery that a detective linked to one questionable case was also prominent in another.

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Conclusion

This episode of Australian True Crime delves into how the pursuit of harsh justice in the face of public outcry can lead to questionable legislation and potentially wrongful convictions. Peter Breen’s call for a Criminal Cases Review Commission in Australia highlights the need for robust oversight and the risk of leaving innocent people behind bars for life.

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Further Information:

• Peter Breen's book: Mistaken Identity or Stitch Up
• Lifeline: 13 11 14
• 1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732
• 13 Yarn (Indigenous support): 13 92 76

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Transcript

[Host]

In February 1986, Sydney nurse Anita Cobby was abducted at random, raped and murdered by a group of young men led by a teenager. Two years later, in 1988, a group of street kids in their mid teens abducted, raped and murdered Janine Balding from the car park of Sydney's Sutherland train station. In response to the horrific crimes, the New South Wales state government passed special legislation condemning the young offenders to spend the rest of their lives in prison with no possibility of parole. They called it cementing them in. Criminal lawyer and former independent member of the New South Wales Parliament, Peter Breen believes there are problems with this legislation and approach. Not least, he believes that at least two of the men imprisoned all those years ago are innocent and weren't even present at the crimes. He's written a book called Mistaken Identity or Stitch up, and he joins us.

[Interviewer]

On Australian True Crime to talk about it.

[Host]

This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created. The Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung People of the Kulin Nation and a warning. This episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

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[Peter Breen]

Look, it's one of those things, you know, it lands on your desk and you look at it and think, oh, that's too hard, and you push to one side. And then because I was in Parliament, it kept coming up in debate. And then there was special laws directed at this guy Jamison as well as a number of other guys. And because it was. Because I was a politician, I. I was worried about the borderline between judicial power under the constitution and legislative power. And I didn't think it was within the power of lawmakers to trespass into the jurisdiction of judges by passing special laws, especially retrospective laws, affecting these guys. No matter how terrible they were, they should be punished according to the punishments at the time of their crimes, not retrospectively, which is what the state Parliament was trying to do when I was a member.

[Interviewer]

So it seems like there's two issues in this book, Shorty. Mistaken identity or stitch up. And they are the cementing in laws that were passed by New South Wales Parliament. Those laws were passed in response to two terrible, terrible murders of young women by strangers, by groups of strangers. Firstly was Anita Cobby and then not long after that was Jeanine Balding.

[Peter Breen]

Yes. And also Virginia Morse. Three, actually.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Peter Breen]

Virginia Morse Virginia Morse.

[Interviewer]

You're talking about that. You're talking about the. Is that what you mean by the crossover from legislature to.

[Peter Breen]

Yeah, like, you know, in the normal world, if the courts have made a decision that someone should stay in jail forever, you know, then you respect that as a decision of the court and, you know, you can appeal it if there's grounds available, but otherwise you just have to accept it. But this was unusual because it was the politicians intervening in the court, you know, and exercising judicial power.

[Interviewer]

I read a book years and years ago called Never To Be Released, and I thought the book was amazing and was about these crimes and some similar ones. But the COVID art featured an absolutely terrifying. It was a manipulated photograph, manipulated image. But the. This person on the COVID became the stuff of nightmares for me. His name was Shorty Jamieson. Yes, that's his nickname, obviously. Stephen Shorty Jamison. And they described him as a street kid, or, mind you, he was in his early 20s when the crime against Janine Balding occurred. One of a number of boys. There was one girl who abducted, raped, murdered a lady as she got off the train, virtually. And this is the person about whom you have written a book? Well, him and some others have featured into it. But I became sort of obsessed with Shorty Jamison, especially as I realised not long after reading that book, that there was some conjecture as to whether he was the actual Shorty who was present at the crime. When did you become aware of Shorty Jamison?

[Peter Breen]

I organised to go and see him. He was at Goulburn. Jameson, you know, just struck me as a. A person with mental deficiencies. In other words, he was a simple person.

[Interviewer]

So this is a person who was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, whose life has been incredibly difficult childhood, incredibly difficult. But in reading your book, and certainly I've heard other murmurs that he's co accused Matthew Elliott, Bronson Blessington, Wayne Wilmot and I think Carol Ann Aro as well. All of them said then, and they say now that he wasn't there.

[Peter Breen]

Jamieson was arrested two weeks after the others and when they brought him into the cells, the other four all laughed at the police and said, ha ha, you got the wrong Shorty. And the police said, no, we've got the right Shorty. He's signed a record of interview. He's been identified as the person at the crime scene named Shorty. And they kept laughing and saying, no, no, he's the wrong one. Ha ha. You know, you're so stupid, arresting the wrong Shorty. And for them, it was a Joke?

[Interviewer]

Well, I'm sure they thought it would be rectified at some point.

[Peter Breen]

Well, the next day, two detectives came into the cells with photographs, 12 photographs. And they separated the four children that were there and asked them to identify who the shorty was from these 12 photographs. And they all pointed separately to the police. They all pointed to photograph number seven, which was a photograph of a guy named Shorty Wells. And they all told detectives, the four of them, no, no, you've got the wrong shorty. And they still thought it was a joke. But this other shorty was clearly identified the day after he was taken into custody.

[Interviewer]

So what went wrong?

[Peter Breen]

Well, what went wrong was that there was a police record of interview which had been fabricated. And as a result, the police couldn't walk away from it. You know, they were stuck with it. They had to defend the. The police record of interview.

[Interviewer]

The record of interview comes up a lot in the book because you've had it analysed by various people. And they're basically saying, shorty Jamison struggles to express himself verbally, and yet this record has paragraphs and paragraphs of someone waxing lyrical about what happened that night. And you have experts who say, he can't have said all that.

[Peter Breen]

Well, it's a narrative that you just can't imagine coming out of his mouth because he talks in two or three sentences, then stops. You know, you have to prompt him to keep talking. And the law about records of interview is that it has to be a verbatim record of what the prisoner said. So the three of them have been in jail for 37 years, and the other two, Blessington and Elliot, still say to this day, he's the wrong guy.

[Interviewer]

You also spoke to the Murphy brothers who were convicted of Anita Cobby's murder. I mean, these are such hot potatoes, these guys. This is why the Carr government felt confident in just saying, cement them in, lock them up forever.

[Peter Breen]

But what, you know, what struck me about the Anita Cobby case was it was only two years before the Janine Balding case. One was 86 and the other was 88. And immediately I saw the name of the detective, Kevin Rao, who was one of the detectives or the detective that signed the false record of interview in the Jamison case. When I saw the detective Rao was one of the detectives in the Anita Cobby case and that he'd signed the record of interview of Les Murphy, I actually couldn't wait to get to see Les and get some information about his record of interview. And I was astounded how similar it was to Jameson's. You know, the modus operandi, the threats, encouragements, to sign up or we'll bash you. I mean, it was just so obvious that they'd operated in exactly the same way as they'd operated previously. So I kind of got stuck with both cases.

[Interviewer]

So, similarly, the co offenders in that case, John Travers, Michael Murdoch, Michael Murphy and Les Murphy have all said that Gary Murphy was not there.

[Peter Breen]

Yes, exactly the same situation.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Two very serious scenarios that you present us with in this book. One that, you know, should children be. Should we be able to lock up children forever for the rest of their lives for an offence? Is any offence deserving of that? Is that the kind of society we want to be? Is it a fundamental misunderstanding?

[Peter Breen]

It actually wouldn't happen if they were committed the same crime today as juveniles, they wouldn't get life sentences.

[Interviewer]

Well, it wouldn't happen now. But again, with the pressure that's being applied at the moment about youth crime, it makes you wonder if it could happen again.

[Peter Breen]

Well, it could happen in Victoria again because the Premier wants to up the ante on juvenile crime and create life sentences never to be released for juveniles, which is just bizarre that the Premier would want to do that, in my opinion. But anyway, that's the Premier's prerogative. Look, it's difficult, but they're still children at the end of the day, and their brains haven't properly developed. They don't plan crimes, they act spontaneously. If they get involved in car stealing and carjacking and breaking and entering into people's houses, that's a huge problem and we can't put up with that as a community. We have to do something about it. But I don't think we should be considering giving them life sentences for carjacking for the sake.

[Interviewer]

But what about these extreme crimes?

[Peter Breen]

What about women for murder and multiple rapes and. And cruelty on a completely unacceptable level.

[Interviewer]

It's terrifying.

[Peter Breen]

But even for adults, if adults commit those crimes and adults plan their crimes, whereas children mostly act spontaneously. And if you look at any serious crime that a child commits, you're almost always going to find a spontaneous reaction, either to something that's been said or some situation or circumstance they're in.

[Interviewer]

And also, it's no motivation to behave yourself in prison.

[Peter Breen]

These people are dangerous. That's why we've got supermax prisons, you know, these people are dangerous if you've.

[Interviewer]

Got no hope of getting out. I remember when Carl Williams was murdered by Matthew Johnson in prison and they said, oh, well, he did it because he's never getting out, so he doesn't care.

[Peter Breen]

That's right. And, you know, they wait, like they wait for 30 years in the hope that they're gonna get out. But if they know that they're never gonna get out and that there are really no consequences of their actions, they're very bloody dangerous.

[Interviewer]

Which is what, again, makes these men remarkable. These men, for as much as they know, are never getting out of prison. And yet, I'm talking about Blessington and Elliot and Jamison all behave themselves impeccably.

[Peter Breen]

Yeah, they do. And they've all been the subject of parole board inquiries. And the parole board says that they're okay to be released. The psychiatrists say they're okay to be released, but the state government still has in place the cement law. So they're not gonna be released until they're. Until they've been in jail for at least 30 years and until they're physically incapable of hurting anyone. That's what the law says.

[Interviewer]

So that means dying, basically.

[Peter Breen]

Yeah. They can't get out of jail unless they get cancer, for example, or unless they. And even then, they've still gotta jump through the normal hoops of psychiatric assessment and the parole board. And they're all good things in place because they protect the community and they make sure that we don't put lunatics back in the community. But having got through those hoops, then, in my opinion, they shouldn't be in jail forever until they die. It's just, on some level, fundamentally unjust.

[Interviewer]

And unfair and inhumane.

[Peter Breen]

Inhumane, absolutely.

[Interviewer]

You make the point that Blessington, who was 14 when he was arrested, has the longest sentence anyone in Australia's been given since convict times.

[Peter Breen]

Yes. As a child. Yeah, absolutely.

[Interviewer]

I guess the main issue is that we have potentially two of these men who are innocent, you know, irrespective of their behaviour or their.

[Peter Breen]

So you're talking about Jemison and you're talking about.

[Interviewer]

I'm talking about Jemison and Gary Murphy.

[Peter Breen]

Gary Murphy, yeah. And that's why we should have a Criminal Cases Review Commission.

[Host]

What is that?

[Peter Breen]

Well, it's a fully funded government body that has access to all the evidence, and if someone has a reasonable story that they should investigate, the Criminal Cases Review Commission will examine it. And so there's no. You don't have people like me that have got to fund inquiries or fund court fees or, you know, fund DNA testing fees and that sort of stuff. The Criminal Cases Review Commission does it. And they're in every Commonwealth country except Australia. They're in Canada, they're in the UK and it's operated really well. Like, they've found over 500 people wrongly convicted in the UK as a result of the criminal cases, actually.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Your stats in the book are incredible.

[Peter Breen]

Yeah, yeah, look, it's huge. People generally, commentators generally say that between 1 and 2% of the prison population in all Commonwealth countries, including Australia, is wrongly convicted. What that means is that this idea of what's called utilitarian punishment, people say, oh, well, you know, they're probably, you know, they might be innocent of what they're in jail for, but they're obviously guilty. Look at their records. So, you know, we'll have this utilitarian punishment thing and just leave them in jail. But, you know, in a case like Jamison's where he's just so obviously the wrong person, seems to me that only a Criminal Cases Review Commission could get to the bottom of it without going through all the dramas that he's had to go through. Like, it's been 25 years since he's been. Well, since I've been involved in his case. 25 years. And, you know, he's been in jail for 37, so it's just too long.

[Host]

Thank you to our guest, Peter Breen. You'll find a link in the show notes to this episode to help you get your copy of Shorty Mistaken Identity or stitch up. If you need support after listening to this podcast, you can call Lifeline on 131114 or contact 1-800-Respect on 1-800-737-732 or 1-800Respect.org Indigenous Australians can contact 13 Yarn on 139276 or 13yarn.org au.

[Producer]

The producers of this podcast recognize the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded. They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders past, present and those emerging.