Jamison 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, ha, you got the wrong 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.

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 Baldwin, 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 Shorty, Mistaken Identity or Stitch Up,

and he joins us on Australian True Crime to talk about it.

This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this

podcast is created, the Wurundri Woi Warang people of the Koolin Nation.

And a warning. This episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

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.

...