It was that motive, Mr Arrington said, that drove Watson to allegedly turn off the flow of air to Tina Watson's scuba mask and held her until she drowned. As part of the opening statements, the prosecution showed the jurors an underwater photo snapped by a nearby diver, showing Watson swimming to the surface as his wife was sprawled in the water. Defence lawyers say Tina Watson's death was misinterpreted by the Australian authorities, who took a problem with Watson's dive computer as evidence of possible guilt, and proceeded to view new evidence with that in mind.
Brett Bloomston, Watson's lawyer, sketched out a completely different scenario of what happened during the dive on the Great Barrier Reef, saying Tina Watson panicked and knocked off her husband's diving mask, forcing him to swim to the surface without her.
Read our exclusive extract from A Second Chance for Justice. The mountain of collected evidence was presented to a coronial inquest in , and Watson, who had returned to the US, was committed to stand trial in Queensland for murder. Instead, he returned to Australia and struck a deal with prosecutors to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter.
Courts were falling well behind national efficiency standards, while horrendously overworked prosecutors were lumbered with an average of 79 cases a year. The courts were further strained by two other expensive and lengthy trials, including manslaughter charges against notorious Bundaberg Hospital doctor Jayant Patel.
Police, already gutted by Watson not facing a murder trial, also felt the conditions of the plea bargain were unacceptable. As part of the deal, a summary of facts was agreed on by the prosecution and defence teams, which the judge used to decide on a sentence. In October , while Gabe Watson was seeing out the final month of his sentence in Borallon Correctional Centre, William Thomas was pursuing justice for his dead daughter on home soil.
Within five hours, the jury had agreed, and indicted Watson on charges of capital murder for pecuniary gain, and capital murder by kidnapping. Prosecutors could not afford to produce key witnesses from Australia, and were unable to present key evidence painstakingly constructed by police.
Police also uncovered an email that Watson had sent the dive operator five months before the honeymoon, inquiring about the diving conditions at the SS Yongala site. An employee replied that because Tina was an inexperienced diver, she should either take an orientation dive or not dive at the site at all. But again, the judge refused to allow the evidence to be used, because the employee was unable to testify. With the prosecution hamstrung, the judge decided there was not enough evidence to continue proceedings and threw the case out.
In October , an Alabama grand jury indicted Watson on two counts -- murder for pecuniary gain and kidnapping where a felony occurred. Those charges were based on the premise that Watson hatched the plot to kill his wife while in Alabama. The doctrine of double jeopardy -- which says that a person cannot be tried or punished twice for the same crime -- did not apply because two separate sovereigns, a state government and a foreign government, were seeking to prosecute, said John Lentine, a Birmingham criminal defense attorney and law school professor.
After his sentence was complete, the Australian government held Watson for a short time in immigration detention in light of its policy of not extraditing anyone who might face the death penalty.
Australian authorities deported him back to the United States after getting assurance from U. Watson was then arrested, in November , in Los Angeles. In the opening arguments of Watson's U. But defense attorney Brett Bloomston said that Tina's father was the beneficiary on her workplace insurance policy. Watson filed for some expenses from a travel policy, but it was denied on a technicality, Bloomston said. His client did sue an insurance company when it denied him an accidental death benefit, the attorney said.
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