40 Year Prison Sentence for Australia’s ‘Worst Paedophile’
Ruecha Tokputza has been described in court as “Australia’s worst paedophile”, and has been sentenced to 40 years imprisonment after pleading guilty to 50 charges including having sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 14, engaging in sexual...
Colonising First Nations: From the Killing Times to Reserves to Incarceration
The British colonisation of the continent now referred to as Australia was based on terra nullius, meaning the land was neither owned nor occupied. As the High Court of Australia acknowledged in 1992, this was a lie, which was obvious...
Australian Prisoner Rights Activist Ends 33-Day Hunger Strike
Sydney man Jock Palfreeman has ended his month-long hunger strike inside correctional facilities in Bulgaria. The 32-year-old began his protest on 21 April, with the aim of drawing attention to rights violations in the local prison system, as well as...
Making Government Accountable: An Interview With Human Right Watch’s Elaine Pearson
In a tragic of sign of just how much a part of Australia today the 500-odd men still being held in transit centres on Manus Island actually are, at least six detainees have attempted suicide since they learnt that the...
Should It be a Crime to Publish Fake News?
Integrity campaigners have labelled the spread of disinformation during the recent Federal Election campaign as ‘intolerable’, and are calling for criminal laws specifically designed to deter such conduct in the future. One campaigner, former NSW supreme court justice Anthony Whealy,...
Police Use of Strip Searches Skyrockets in NSW
At the 11 May Midnight Mafia festival at Sydney Olympic Park, NSW police officers searched 272 punters following an indication from a sniffer dog. Of these, 32 were charged with possession and eight were issued with new on-the-spot fines. This...
The Crime of Kidnapping in New South Wales
A mother and daughter have been sentenced to imprisonment for detaining, assaulting and attempting to force a woman to transfer title to a car. Judge Warwick Hunt of the Downing Centre District Court heard that between 3.40pm and 7pm on...
What is a Penalty Unit?
Many regulatory and criminal offences in Australia come with maximum penalties that consist wholly or partly of fines that are calculated in penalty units. For example, the maximum penalty for the criminal offence of drug possession in New South Wales...
Morrison’s Victory and What the Nation Has Agreed To
Last week, he was our unelected PM. Indeed, the ex-immigration minister had presented himself as the “accidental” head of state following last August’s Liberal leadership spill. But, on Saturday, the nation spoke, and choose Scott Morrison as our duly elected...
Past Trauma Elicits More Sympathy Than a Mental Health Condition
A study from the United States has found that jurors are generally more sympathetic towards defendants who have experienced a difficult upbringing than those who suffer from chronic brain injuries and disorders such as paranoid schizophrenia and anti-social personality disorder....
