Debating The Evidence

"The Crown's portrayal of the relationship between the accused and the deceased was selective and it did not portray the complete picture. 
"They still had a warm and lighthearted and affectionate relationship."
Philip Strickland, lawyer for the defence
[Do not disregard the] "likelihood that out of desperation, Lisa Harnum voluntarily climbed over the balustrade to escape Simon Gittany or as a cry for attention.
"Or one cannot eliminate the possibility she intended to kill herself."

'Insanely jealous' boyfriend denies throwing his girlfriend from 15th-floor apartment balcony -- The Independent

There are hugely incriminating pieces of evidence. Sometimes pictures speak more forcefully than mere words, let alone mere words of conjecture. And in this instance graphic photographs through video attestations of violence having occurred between the attacker and the attacked provide more than sufficient evidence to leap over conjecture and arrive at guilt.

Over and above the "warm and lighthearted and affectionate" relationship that Simon Gittany's lawyer urges the judge to consider, there was the reality of a controlling, jealous man whose treatment of the young woman from Canada living with him in Australia she found alarming enough to impart to her mother, and threatening enough to want to leave him.

Video footage, as the lawyer pointed out helpfully, does not exist of whatever occurred within the 15th-floor apartment in Sydney. It cannot truly be known what happened in the moments after Simon Gittany 37, took Lisa Harnum, 30, in a violent headlock and dragged her back into the apartment. And how it happened that she fell to her death 15 stories below.

But other videos do exist, one of Simon Gittany exiting the apartment and apparently holding his head in concern or distress, making his way down to the lobby in an elevator. It was a video that he had himself installed to keep track of the movements of his fiance whom he had ordered never to look at other men.

Court evidence A CCTV image showing Lisa Harnum being dragged into a 15th-floor apartment by her fiancé Simon Gittany moments before he allegedly threw her off the balcony.

Oh yes, and another video, one slightly earlier in time, that clearly shows him dragging her in a headlock back into their home, with his hands over her mouth lest she most inconveniently call out for help, in a way that women who are violently attacked and fear for their lives, have a habit of doing.

Her desperate "Help me!", "God help me!" a moment before her fall, was heard, however. And hardly seem like the spontaneous utterances of someone resolved to commit suicide, now do they?

That happened in the summer of 2011. He has been free on bail since January of 2011. And he found time enough to distract himself from the pending trial to come, to avail himself of a new girlfriend.

On trial: Simon Gittany and his current girlfriend  -- The Independent

"I told her if things got really bad, just to grab her passport and purse and get out, that her things don't matter", related Joan Harnum, Lisa's mother, as she testified at the trial and spoke of her daughter's fear and resolve to leave the man who dominated her life.

There are complications in material evidence; none exists in the way of evidence of a struggle in the apartment, there were no bits of torn hair, no blood or scraped skin under Lisa Harnum's fingernails. There was also nothing to be found on the railing, like fingerprints when she might have propelled herself, as the defence claims, over it, in a suicide attempt.

She had been a ballerina, which gave the lawyer the inspiration to suggest in his client's defence that this troubled young woman had killed herself, even accidentally; she might have decided to perform a "ballerina style jump" to propel herself acrobatically, elegantly, morbidly-intentioned, over the balcony; her viciously violent fiancee quite innocent.