FORMER elite water polo player Keli Lane, who was convicted of murdering her newborn baby Tegan, has had an application for bail refused in a Sydney court.Lane made the application in the NSW Supreme Court today pending an appeal against her conviction, which saw her sentenced in April 2011 to at least 13 years and five months in jail for the murder of her two-day-old daughter in September 1996.
Appearing via audio-visual link in prison greens, Lane bowed her head as Justice Clifton Hoeben announced he was refusing bail.Lane, whose now dark hair was severely pulled back in a low bun, was supported in court by her parents Sandra and Robert Lane and her boyfriend Patrick Cogan.The 37-year-old former water polo champion has continued to maintain she handed Tegan over to the infant’s father, a man with whom she said she had a brief affair.Lane had two terminations as a teenager and had kept three pregnancies and births secret from family and friends.She had adopted out her first and third babies but no trace of Tegan has been found since she left a Sydney hospital with Lane.The crown contended Lane murdered Tegan because a child would have interfered with her sporting, sex and social life.
In making the brief bail application, Lane’s barrister, Winston Terracini QC, said he was relying on two of their grounds of appeal.
The first was that the trial judge failed to leave an alternative count of manslaughter open to the jury, while the other was the “conduct of the prosecution”.
Mr Terracini said there was no evidence in the Lane case “of infliction of any harm with any intent”.
He said there was also a problem with crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi’s method of questioning during the trial, which he submitted reversed the onus of proof.
He likened this method to that used by Mr Tedeschi during the trial of Gordon Wood, whose conviction for the murder of 24-year-old model Caroline Byrne was overturned last year by the Court of Criminal Appeal.
“It’s not as bad as Wood but it’s pretty bad,” Mr Terracini said.
Justice Hoeben said while he understood the points raised by Lane’s defence, they were an issue for the appeal court, not for a bail application.
Following an appearance at the appeal court last month, Lane’s solicitor Ben Archbold told reporters that her bail application would be a “good test” of the strength of her appeal and whether or not it would be successful.He said while Lane was “obviously disappointed” they were “still positive in respect to her appeal”.Lane was sentenced to a maximum of 18 years, with her earliest date for release set for May 2023.
In a directions hearing less than an hour before Lane’s bail application at the Supreme Court, her defence was ordered to serve further submissions on her appeal by March 13.
