A young Redlands artist has attempted to shed light on the issue of criminal injustice in Australia by painting portraits of individuals who have been wrongfully convicted of major crimes.
Raised in Alexandra Hills, Sky Parra is an art student attempting to humanise the issue of wrongful convictions in Australia.
Now based out of her studio in Manly, Ms Parra has spent the last year collaborating with distinguished South Australian-based legal scholar Dr Robert Moles on a research-led art project that has seen her travel around the country meeting with and painting portraits of innocent Australians convicted of crimes.
Ms Parra's project, named DENIED, is entirely self-funded and hopes to shine a spotlight on Australia's criminal injustice.
"You think about somewhere like America, and you see it on the telly and in the media, and you sort of think that their systems are really corrupt," she said.
"But then you do a little bit of scratching of the surface here, and you realise that some of our issues are actually worse, they're just more successfully swept under the rug."
Art highlights human dignity
Initially, the project began with an entry into an art prize hosted by Gold Coast Law firm BMG and Griffith University's Innocence Project, which helps free innocent Australians who have been wrongfully convicted.
In her attempts to familiarize herself with the issue, Ms Parra reached out to Dr Robert Moles in South Australia.
Dr Moles is a legal academic and a leading researcher in the field of miscarriages of justice whose work has involved helping overturn wrongful convictions.
He has spent the last 20 years writing books and articles on the topic and was successful in creating a new right of appeal in South Australian criminal cases, marking the first change to Australian appeal rights in over 100 years.
He said a lot of his work was text based, consisting of writing books and articles about wrongful convictions.
"When Sky first approached me and said that she wanted to do some portrayals of people involved with wrongful convictions, I could immediately see that was a way of trying to convey something that was totally different to what we'd been doing over the last 20 years."
"They're ordinary people who have been caught up in something awful and Sky has a talent to be able to represent that to the wider community and show the humanity of the people that we're dealing with."
Dr Moles has helped Ms Parra establish contact with many individuals across Australia who have been wrongfully convicted.
Ms Parra said her paintings let the individuals feel seen.
"What I'm trying to bring, I suppose, is their dignity and their humanity back into the public eye," she said.
"It's really hard once their image has been tainted by media ... lots of people think there was just no evidence to prove them guilty, but really their innocence is usually quite black and white."
Australia's injustice
According to Dr Moles, Australia's criminal injustice has been a very serious, overlooked issue.
Civil Liberties Australia have estimated that roughly 300 Australians are currently serving prison sentences for wrongful convictions.
In the United Kingdom, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) was established in 1997 as an independent public body to review possible miscarriages of justice in the courts.
Dr Moles said miscarriages of justice don't get quite the same amount of attention here because Australia doesn't have a proper body to review cases.
"Australia has the worst criminal injustice record in the anglosphere," he said.
"The sort of corruption, and things that go wrong in Australia never quite get the same airing and attention as they would in the UK."
Ms Parra hoped her paintings would draw the public's attention to the scale of the issue in Australia.
"To expose them to the public is to make the public aware that people aren't necessarily doing their jobs."
