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The hanging of Ray Williams - Part 1

By Dave Smith - posted Monday, 8 August 2005


The dilemma

September 28, 2004 was an historic day for me. Ray Williams came to me for advice! Ray never comes to me for advice. Why would he? He was the former CEO of HIH Insurance, once one of the largest insurance companies in the southern hemisphere. What possible wisdom could I have to pass on to him?

Now me asking Ray for advice - that happened all the time! Every time I needed to know how to manage our church or how to handle a staff member or how to balance a budget, I’d be on the blower to Ray. And the man always came through for me.

Perhaps it would be helpful at this point to insert a brief comment about how I developed this sort of relationship with Ray. By unhappy coincidence, my dear father died in March 2001, the same month Ray’s company, HIH Insurance, went into liquidation. Prior to March 2001, Ray wouldn’t have been able to play the role of fatherly advisor to me even if he had wanted to. He had been a generous supporter of our Youth Centre at one stage, but had never had the time to really get involved.

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All that changed after March 2001 and by the time we re-established contact, he was pouring most of his time into voluntary work: driving the bus at the retirement home where his mother lived and doing the cleaning at his son’s tennis club. It didn’t take long before we had him on the team at every fundraiser we put on for our youth centre.

Somewhere in that period between March 2001 and September 2004, Ray made a transition from being a much appreciated volunteer and supporter, to being a dearly loved friend and father figure. I should have been chuffed that he wanted my advice on something. But I wasn’t pleased at all. I was scared.

Ray had sounded rather fragile when I had spoken to him on the phone the night before his court appearance and Ray normally never lets things get him down. What could it be? Was he dying? Was someone in his family seriously ill?

When Ray came to the door, that fragility I’d heard in his voice was showing on his face, “Are you alright?” I asked. “Are you sick?”

“Oh no, I’m fine,” he said. “It’s just the legal stuff that’s getting to me.” I knew it must be pretty serious. “They’re ready to plea bargain with me,” Ray explained, as he sat down in my office. “And I don’t know what to do.” I had heard about plea bargaining on American cop shows, where some no-good hoodlum “dobs” in his boss in exchange for getting a shorter sentence, or something like that.

Ray explained how the system worked in Australia. Not surprisingly, it is a little more subtle. Apparently, they never actually use the term “plea bargaining” or openly “bargain” at all. It seems the lawyers from opposing camps just chat whimsically about “where they might draw a line” if such-and-such were to happen. It’s a sort of Clayton’s bargaining process: the bargain you make where no one can ever prove you made a bargain.

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Ray told me the bargain they’d offered him. “They’ve told me if I plead guilty to three relatively minor charges, they’ll stop pursuing me on all other matters.”

"OK. That sounds pretty encouraging,” I said.

I knew they’d been compiling an enormous list of charges to bring against Ray, charges ranging from the uninformed to the completely ridiculous, so far as I could see. Nonetheless, the prosecutors seemed to operate on the principle that if they threw a lot of accusations at him, some of them were bound to stick.

My favourite old philosophical adage holds true of course: ten leaking buckets hold exactly the same amount of water as one leaking bucket (i.e. no water at all). Even so, the multi-bucket approach carries a certain emotive force and given that these characters needed to justify the amount of public money that had been spent on pursuing Ray, this also made it appear as if they’d been earning their fat salaries.

Ray had gone silent. I prodded him again, “So, what’s the problem? They’ve offered to drop most of the charges in return for finding you guilty on a couple of little ones. It sounds to me like they’ve recognised they haven’t really got much against you. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Ray. “But the problem is…these things they want me to plead guilty to…I didn’t do them!”

Ah! So there’s the rub!

Ray went on to explain, “If the charges were simply that I’d been negligent or had overlooked something I shouldn’t have overlooked, I think I could live with that. But these charges say I deliberately misled people and that I knowingly withheld information and David … I didn’t! If I had known some of these things, there’s no way I would have held back the information. I didn’t know these things! But now they’re telling me that unless I confess to the charges, I will go to jail!”

The overall picture was pretty ugly. Allow me to summarise. What was put to Ray was if he confessed to the three little crimes, the whole legal inquisition would be over by Christmas and he would probably not have to spend any time in jail. Conversely, he was told in no uncertain terms that if he did not confess to the three little crimes, the legal team would pursue him with everything they had and the case would drag on for another two to three years. It would cost him between $2-$3 million more in legal fees and he would certainly end up in jail at the end of it all.

Now, I’m not privy to Ray’s personal financial affairs, but I do know he lost everything when HIH collapsed. There was no way he could afford to fight the legal battle for another two or three years. Even if he did have the financial resources, I wonder if he could have lasted emotionally. They seemed to have him over a barrel, but Ray couldn’t bring himself to accept the inevitable conclusion. I didn’t want to accept it either.

“Now is not the time to sell your soul, is it Ray?” I said.

“No,” he said. “And I know I couldn’t carry through with it anyway. Even if I did sign something now, saying I confessed to these things, I’d get up before the court and somebody would look me in the eye and ask, ‘Did you deliberately withhold this information?’ And I’d break down. I’d say, ‘No, I didn’t’. I wouldn’t be able to carry it through. I’ve got to keep fighting. But how can I?”

Apparently one senior legal guy had said to Ray, “Look mate, I’d confess to raping my own mother if it would keep me out of jail”. Ray had been unimpressed, but he was in a dilemma.

This is the way our legal system works. I've seen it operate like this before, grinding good people down until they can't fight any more. Truth is not the issue. Neither is guilt or innocence. It's a war between two parties and Ray was on the wrong side of the government and the media and was a scapegoat to assuage the public thirst for vengeance. What hope did he have?

The decision

Ray reappeared exactly one week later. This in itself was no surprise. Every Tuesday the staff and volunteers of the church have lunch together and Ray would often join us. What surprised me was what he said to me as soon as lunch was over, “Dave, I’m going to take the guilty plea”.

“Um … great! I think that’s good,” I said. “This means you won’t go to jail, right?”

“Well, we don’t know for sure,” he said. “But I really have no choice.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

"What I mean is I've accepted the fact that I am going to be found guilty, no matter what I do. So it's just a question of whether I should be found guilty now or later."

Apparently, what had happened was the prosecution had gently leaked some of their evidence against Ray to his legal team. It seemed a number of former HIH employees had made submissions that incriminated Ray. The deal was if they made these submissions, they themselves would be immune from prosecution or something like that. Evidently some of these stories were pretty damning.

“It’s just the way things are,” Ray said. “Either I’m going to be found guilty now and cop a lesser penalty, or I’m going to fight on and be found guilty a few years down the track and cop a greater penalty. And frankly, I don’t know how much longer I can keep fighting.”

Ray was right. He had no choice. This is the way our legal system works. It’s a system designed to reward the clever, the powerful and the prudent, not the honest. We all knew Ray was innocent of the charges that had been laid against him, but that wasn't even relevant. Ray was doing battle with the government, the media and a vindictive public that had been lulled into believing he was a criminal. What hope did he have?

When I was a young man, I used to think it was the role of the court to bring out the truth. How naive I was! Truth has no place in our system. What takes place in a courtroom is just a battle between two parties, with the judge playing the role of referee.

What has truth got to do with it? Perhaps those who play the legal game as professionals find it entertaining. Personally, when it comes to watching people get belted, I prefer boxing. It's a lot less pretentious, there are fewer mismatches and a lot less people get hurt.

Read part 2 here.

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Article edited by Angela Sassone.
If you'd like to be a volunteer editor too, click here.

First published on Father Dave's website in four parts.



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About the Author

Father Dave Smith is Parish Priest, professional boxer, human-rights activist and father of four. He was part of the Mussalaha (reconciliation) delegation to Syria in May 2013. Join Dave's mailing list via his main website - www.fatherdave.org - and read his updates on Syria on www.prayersforsyria.com.

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Related Links
On Line Opinion - The hanging of Ray Williams - Part 2
On Line Opinion - The hanging of Ray Williams - Part 3

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