Court won’t hear Wallace’s mother

The mother of police shooting victim Steven Wallace has had her case rejected by the Supreme Court after she continued her decades-long fight following the death of her son.

Steven Wallace was shot in Waitara over 20 years ago by Senior Constable Keith Abbott, after Wallace attacked the police station and a police car with a golf club. He died at the scene.

After the Crown decided not to prosecute Abbott, Wallace’s mother, Raewyn Wallace, entered a claim through the civil courts that her son had the right not to be deprived of life.

The previous two decades have seen the case progress to the High Court and the Court of Appeal, after a jury acquitted Abbott on the grounds of selfdefence in 2002.

However, the highest court in the country, the Supreme Court, has rejected Raewyn Wallace’s appeal of the Court of Appeal’s upholding, which found in favour of the self-defence exception and overturned a judge’s finding that awarded her more than $130,000 in costs.

In a previous decision, the High Court upheld the original decision in favour of Abbott, saying self-defence was a legal exception to the right to life, but the judge found fault with the official process after Wallace’s death.

The judge said the police investigation of the death did not comply with a Bill of Rights obligation to be sufficiently independent.

Raewyn Wallace progressed the case to the Court of Appeal in an attempt to appeal the High Court’s support of the self-defence exception, leading the Crown to counter-appeal on behalf of police and the attorney-general, saying the judge’s two findings in her favour were wrong.

However, three Court of Appeal judges made the decision to overturn the High Court’s finding in her favour, alongside rejecting her appeal and allowing the Crown’s.

The Court of Appeal said that in the civil case, Raewyn Wallace had not met the standard required to show it was more likely than not that self-defence did not apply.

In their ruling, Justices Joe Williams, Ellen France and Sir Stephen Ko´s said while they agreed that the state’s obligation to investigate Steven Wallace’s death was an important matter, they were not satisfied that the challenge to the Court of Appeal’s conclusions had ‘‘sufficient merit’’ for the case to go forward.

Raewyn Wallace had argued that the prosecution was underresourced, causing counsel to wrongly adopt an overly narrow approach, which the Supreme Court rejected.