Early Legal Career
Wilson was admitted as a barrister and solicitor in 1951. He had a rapid rise in his legal career, becoming Crown Prosecutor for Western Australia in 1959, only eight years after starting work as a lawyer. In 1963, he was admitted as a Queen's Counsel, the youngest ever in WA. As a prosecutor, Wilson earned the nickname of the "Avenging Angel".
In recent years, two men he had prosecuted for murder have had their convictions overturned: John Button, who was convicted in 1963 of the manslaughter of his girlfriend Rosemary Anderson and Darryl Beamish, convicted of the 1959 murder of Jillian Brewer. Perth serial killer, Eric Edgar Cooke, confessed to both offences before he was hanged for other murders, but was not believed by authorities. The convictions were eventually overturned in 2002.
In 1969, Wilson became the Solicitor-General of Western Australia. He served in that position for ten years working under both ALP and Liberal governments.
Read more about this topic: Ronald Wilson
Famous quotes containing the words early, legal and/or career:
“We have been told over and over about the importance of bonding to our children. Rarely do we hear about the skill of letting go, or, as one parent said, “that we raise our children to leave us.” Early childhood, as our kids gain skills and eagerly want some distance from us, is a time to build a kind of adult-child balance which permits both of us room.”
—Joan Sheingold Ditzion (20th century)
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)