A court has found the police officer son of former senator and NSW premier Kristina Keneally fabricated evidence with the intent to mislead a judicial tribunal, landing a wrongly accused man behind bars. Daniel Keneally was charged by the law enforcement conduct commission last year over a statement he made claiming a man had threatened police in a phone call.
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TVTranscript
00:00 Daniel Keneally was working a night shift at Newtown Police Station in February 2021
00:07 when he took a phone call from Luke Moore.
00:09 Now Luke Moore was calling to complain about the police practice of strip searching, but
00:14 Daniel Keneally later put down a detailed statement in which he claimed that Luke Moore
00:19 had made threats to police.
00:21 Now in this statement he put a number of comments in quotation marks in which he said that Luke
00:26 Moore had made a specific threat against a Goulburn detective saying that he was as good
00:31 as gone and dead.
00:33 He also said that I'm coming for him when he at least expects it.
00:38 I know where he works and I'll follow him home were among the comments that Luke Moore
00:42 made.
00:43 Now Luke Moore was later charged with using a carriage service to menace and threaten
00:47 to kill and he spent three weeks behind bars for this charge before he produced a phone
00:52 recording which showed that none of the comments that Daniel Keneally had attributed to him
00:57 had actually been made in that call.
00:59 So Daniel Keneally after police were forced to apologise to Mr Moore and drop the charges
01:04 against him, Daniel Keneally himself was charged in October last year with one count of fabricating
01:11 evidence with intent to mislead a judicial tribunal.
01:14 He pleaded not guilty in the Downing Centre local court but today Magistrate Rodney Brenda
01:19 found the charge had been proven.
01:21 So what else did the Magistrate have to say about it?
01:25 Well during his evidence Daniel Keneally said that he had opened Luke Moore's website during
01:31 the call which was called ISOO Police and became concerned about some of the statements
01:35 in that website.
01:36 He admitted that there could have been some confusion about what Luke Moore had written
01:39 on the website and what he had put down in the statement.
01:43 He said that he was tired at the time, that he wasn't really coping with his job as a
01:46 police officer and that he had not knowingly included anything in that statement which
01:51 he knew to be false.
01:52 However the Magistrate did not buy that argument.
01:55 He basically said that he did not accept that that was what had occurred.
01:58 He said the transcript of the recorded conversation clearly showed that there was no mention of
02:04 a police officer in Goulburn and essentially that an intelligent police officer on a matter
02:08 as serious as this could not make that kind of mistake.
02:12 Now Daniel Keneally was accompanied to court by his father Benjamin Keneally who is a former
02:17 mayor in Sydney and his lawyer spoke outside court.
02:20 Here's what he had to say.
02:23 Mr Keneally holds his head high.
02:25 This won't be the last that we've heard of this particular matter but again we respect
02:30 the court's decision but can say that the matter after sentencing will definitely be
02:34 appealed on the basis that my client, which I firmly believe, never willfully put something
02:42 in a statement that he knew to be false.
02:43 It's a very high hurdle for the prosecution to prove and all I'll say at this stage is
02:48 we respect the court's decision but of course the beauty of our system is we have an appeal
02:53 right.
02:54 Now Daniel Keneally will learn his fate on the 21st of December when he returns to court
02:58 to be sentenced.
02:59 [BLANK_AUDIO]