In 1995, he was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Colin Winchester and was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
On 22 August of the same year, the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory quashed the conviction, released Eastman from prison, and ordered a retrial.
The meeting was brokered by Neil Brown, the shadow attorney-general, who also met with Peter McAulay, the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police.
[8] On 21 December 1988 Winchester advised Eastman that he would need to face the assault charges in court; and an appearance date was set for 12 January 1989.
[9] On 10 January 1989, at about 9:15 pm, Colin Winchester was shot twice in the head with a Ruger 10/22 .22-calibre semi-automatic rifle fitted with a silencer.
During the 85-day trial that commenced in 1995, Eastman repeatedly sacked his legal team and eventually chose to represent himself.
Eastman was legally bugged for three and a half years; yet only a very small proportion of the recorded material was used as evidence in his trial.
[8] In evaluating the case, Flinders University academic, David Hamer, reported that:[14] The prosecution case at trial, while purely circumstantial, was substantial: After a lengthy and difficult trial,[15]: 1 on 3 November 1995 a jury returned a verdict of guilty against Eastman and he was convicted for murder of Winchester.
[17] In 2000 and 2001, while detained in the Goulburn Correctional Centre, Eastman successfully lobbied for and was granted a judicial review of his conviction.
The aim of the review was to determine if Eastman had sufficient mental capacity in order to plead in the trial for the murder of Winchester.
[17][18] After two years of hearings,[19] Miles J determined that Eastman had sufficient capacity and the conviction for murder was unchanged.
[20] Eastman tried again in 2005 on several grounds, including his fitness to stand trial, unreliable forensic evidence taken from the scene, and other doubts as to his guilt.
[21] Louise Taylor, later the first Indigenous Australian jurist in the ACT and the first Aboriginal woman to be appointed as a Supreme Court judge in Australia, worked on the inquiry.
The issue of guilt was determined on the basis of deeply flawed forensic evidence in circumstances where the applicant was denied procedural fairness in respect of a fundamental feature of the trial process concerned with disclosure by the prosecution of all relevant material.
I recommend that the applicant’s conviction on 3 November 1995 for the murder of Colin Stanley Winchester be quashed.The Australian Federal Police unsuccessfully sought that parts of the report be withheld.
[32] Eastman, who had served 19 years in custody, lodged a civil claim against the ACT Government, seeking compensation for wrongful imprisonment.
Eastman appealed the eviction order to the ACT Supreme Court on the basis that he had not been given enough notice to effectively defend his position.
During his period in New South Wales prisons he lodged a large number of complaints alleging ill-treatment by guards and was frequently moved between jails.