Aged-care double murderer Garry Steven Davis should be acquitted or a new trial ordered because the judge who found him guilty used a process of “backwards reasoning”, reversing the onus of proof and leaving Davis as “the last man standing” after other suspects had been eliminated, the Court of Criminal Appeal has heard. Davis, 30, was jailed for a maximum of 40 years with a non-parole of 30 years in December, 2016, after he was found guilty of the murder of Gwen Fowler, 83, and Ryan Kelly, 80, and the attempted murder of Audrey Manuel, 91, after a four-week judge-alone trial in the Newcastle Supreme Court. He lodged an appeal against his convictions and faced a hearing in the Court of Criminal Appeal in Sydney on Monday, where his legal team labelled the guilty verdicts “unreasonable and not supported by the evidence” and claimed that Supreme Court Justice Robert Allan Hulme had erred when admitting coincidence evidence and using it to find that it was a single perpetrator who injected all three elderly, non-diabetic SummitCare Wallsend residents with insulin over two days in October, 2013. The prosecution case against Davis was a circumstantial one and the theory that a single perpetrator was responsible was a significant issue at trial. During his closing address, Crown prosecutor Lee Carr had submitted that there were 11 similarities between the three injections and that, if viewed collectively, they formed a pattern from which the judge could infer that one person was responsible for all three crimes. But defence barrister Graham Turnbull, SC, said those similarities were “situational” and all seemed to be related to Davis’s job as a SummitCare team leader.
