A gross miscarriage of justice

• Senior Crown Prosecutor, Patrick Power, who prosecuted Roseanne at her original 1991 trial and who was present at her 1993 appeal, was also instrumental in bringing charges against Roseanne's son Peter Bridge. After six years he was finally acquitted of the trumped up charges;
• evidence also indicated that Power was personally involved in the Catt children retracting sworn testimony against their father and Peter Thomas concerning the sexual molestation allegations;
• Power was accused by a defence witness, Errol Taylor, of misleading the court at Roseanne’s 1991 trial about corruption allegations against Peter Thomas made by a Crown witness in a trial six months earlier; and
• Power was named by Barry Catt as advising him (Catt) to apply for victim’s compensation despite lack of evidence. Catt and Newell subsequently received $89,000.

Judge Davidson ordered Thomas and Newell be referred to the DPP for perjury and contempt charges. Judge Davidson also said there was further evidence of conspiracy and perjury and that all of Roseanne’s charges were unsafe and should be quashed.

In 2004, evidence of the numerous phone calls that contravened Judge Davidson’s order made by Peter Thomas, Adrian Newell and Barry Catt during the Inquiry, were referred to the NSW Commissioner of Police and the NSW director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, for investigation but no charges were laid.

In 2004 Judge Davidson’s findings of fact went to the NSW Court of Appeal where Roseanne Catt’s sentence was quashed. After 10 years imprisonment she was finally freed. Her claims that she had been framed and wrongfully imprisoned because she agreed to help FACS expose a pedophile ring that included her former husband Barry Catt and other prominent people seemed buried within the convoluted nuances of the NSW legal system.

July 4, 2006 the Roseanne Catt case took a new twist when senior DPP prosecutor, Patrick Power, returned to work from annual leave in Thailand and asked an IT expert at the NSW Office of the DPP to repair his faulty computer. The computer analyst located 29,000 pornographic images, including 433 depicting sex acts involving children, on Power’s computer.

A folder on the hard drive titled “good” contained 31 video files of a sexually explicit nature. The video file contained footage of a middle-aged man having sex on a sofa with a young Asian boy. Another file was titled “Paedo gay man and 5-year-old Thai boy”. The material consisted of still images and video files, the duration of which varied from a few seconds to 37 minutes.

These videos contained scenes of adult males engaged in a variety of sex acts with young children aged 10 years and less as well as adolescents. The material included penetrative oral and anal sex, bondage, masturbation and sex acts between adolescent males.

The computer analyst informed his superiors of the discovery. Later the same day the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdrey, informed Power of the material found on the computer but claimed he did not have the power to prevent Power leaving the Office of DPP (ODPP) before he was interviewed and charged by Police 48 hours later. Power was subsequently arrested July 6, 2006 and his Darlinghurst home was searched the same day.

It was during the intervening 48 hours prior to his arrest that a second, and possibly far more incriminating hard drive, disappeared from Power's computer prior to it being handed over to the DPP's IT department. A reconstruction of material from the missing hard drive showed it contained catalogued files with names strongly suggestive of it being child pornography.

Files on the missing hard drive carried names including: “Naughtyboyz - Weekend House Party”, “Gay porn - threesome rape of blond boy”, and “Gay porn young boy tied gets raped begs for them to stop”. Power, who had two days to hide or destroy the missing hard drive before his home was searched, has refused to produce it to investigators.

Patrick Power’s secret double life, which occupied senior responsible and high-profile positions in the NSW legal profession as well as chairperson of the NSW Youth Justice Advisory Committee responsible for advising the NSW Government on policy, came to an ignominious conclusion when he pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography and resigned from the NSW ODPP earlier this year.

Attempts to maintain damage control and achieve leniency in the courts fell on the shoulders of high profile silk, Ian Barker QC, who has been hired as Power’s legal advocate and defender. Barker is an astute legal tactician who earned his reputation as Crown prosecutor in the 1982 Lindy Chamberlain murder trial when he claimed the theory a dingo had abducted baby Azaria was a "transparent lie".