Declan Cutler death: Teenage killer launches bid to overturn murder conviction
A teenage murderer is hoping to have his conviction overturned by arguing that the testimony of a key witness should have been excluded from his trial.
The teenager, who cannot be identified other than his alias SA, was sentenced to 19 years in prison in July last year after being found guilty of participating in the murder of Declan Cutler.
Declan, 16, was attacked by a group of eight men in the early morning hours of March 13, 2022, after leaving a friend’s house party in Reservoir, a suburb in Melbourne’s north.
In what Supreme Court Justice Rita Incerti described as “two minutes of incalculable inhumanity”, Declan was chased and killed.
“A nearby CCTV camera captured extremely contradictory footage of the deadly group attack,” he said.
“Words cannot describe the shocking brutality and cruelty of the attack on a defenseless child and the images will forever haunt everyone who saw it, especially Declan’s parents.”
The teenage boys charged in connection with Declan’s death were linked to a youth gang known as the 9ers, which has ongoing tensions with another youth gang, H-town.
Declan had no connection to H-town, but the boys believed the members were at the party.
The appeal against SA’s conviction was lodged in the Victorian Court of Appeal on Thursday morning as barrister Alexander Patton argued Judge Incerti made a mistake in allowing a witness to testify at the trial.
This witness, nicknamed TH, was a friend of Declan’s who said SA was among the group.
‘I didn’t want to snitch’
Mr Patton told the court there was a “significant amount of evidence” that TH had been drunk on the night, and the boy later said he believed he had been “administered fentanyl”.
He said the boy gave evidence that he had only “bits and pieces” of memory of the night and questioned how he could positively identify SA during a brief interaction.
“What can be made of a fleeting observation of a dark-skinned male in the early morning hours on a largely unlit residential street?” he said.
Mr Patton said TH was initially uncooperative with police and told them he “didn’t want to be exploited” until about 36 hours after Declan’s death.
He suggested that the boy’s memory may have been affected by what others later told him or what he saw on social media.
In response, Crown prosecutor Diana Piekusis KC said TH’s evidence was “only one piece of circumstantial evidence which forms part of a strong and convincing body of evidence”.
He told the court that Judge Incerti considered TH to be an unreliable witness and suggested that there was no risk of the judge misusing his evidence.
Judges Phillip Priest, Christopher Boyce and Stephen Kaye reserved their judgment and will rule on the appeal at a later date.
Six other children were also sentenced to prison for their roles in Declan’s death.
Four boys were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 15 years to 19 years and 6 months on murder charges.
One child was sentenced to four years in prison for manslaughter, and another was sentenced to three years and six months for deliberately causing serious injury in circumstances of severe violence.
It turned out that the eighth child, the youngest of the group who was 13 when Declan was killed, was too young to be held criminally responsible for the murder.
