Kathleen Folbigg’s ‘fierce women’ on the need to challenge misogyny in criminal cases

Tracy Chapman on her property in Glenreagh, NSW. ‘I kept going because I could and I would,’ Chapman says. Photograph: David Maurice Smith/The Guardian

In the week since Kathleen Folbigg was pardoned and released from prison, she has been unravelling the learned behaviours from 20 years spent in prison: no longer eating dinner at 3.30pm, or having to wait for a guard before opening a door. Realising she has free choice.

But Tracy Chapman, Folbigg’s longtime friend and advocate, says they have also started turning their minds to what might be learned from Folbigg’s experience. First and foremost by proving the impetus to establish a Criminal Cases Review Commission, as exists in the UK and New Zealand, to examine miscarriages of justice.