The Offence of Choking, Suffocation and Strangulation in New South Wales
In December 2018, the NSW Parliament passed the Crimes Legislation Amendment Bill which inserted a new section 37(1A) into the Crimes Act 1900. Unlike the existing section 37, subsection (1A) does not require the prosecution to prove that the defendant’s...
Sydney Criminal Lawyers® Weekly Rundown – Articles from 9 to 15 December 2019
In case you’ve missed any of them, here’s a rundown of the past week’s articles: Iraqi Protesters Risk All for a Unified, Diverse and Secular State Thousands are risking their lives to call for a complete overhaul of how the...
Foreign-Owned Companies Avoid Billions in Tax
As thousands of Australians wonder how they’ll put food on the table this Christmas, the Australian Tax Office (ATO) has released figures which (again) show that many large companies have avoided paying tax in recent years. Despite many individuals being...
Victorian Sex Workers Demand “Full” Decriminalisation
Sex work is work, no matter which way you look at it. Workers in the sex industry get paid for providing a service. And yet, they’re not afforded the same rights and protections as other workers. Indeed, in many cases,...
NSW Justice Amendment Package Part 2: More Powers for Corrective Services and Sheriffs
It’s been another huge year in NSW parliament. The focus this time, however, wasn’t so much on rights eroding counterterrorism legislation, but the further stripping of civil liberties through last month’s enactment of the anti-protest Right to Farm Bill 2019....
Drug Policing Causes Most of the Harms: An Interview With Former Police Sergeant Greg Denham
Last August marked the 50th anniversary of one of the most significant music festivals of all time, Woodstock. The four day event involved the coming together of close to half a million people, and as is well-known, the hippies that...
What is Extortion?
The Federal Court’s judgment in 2020 had found Centrelink’s ‘robodebt system’ to be unlawful, and ordered the federal government to pay the legal costs of a social security recipient who challenged a debt notice that was issued to her in...
Landmark Victory for Police Corruption Whistleblower: An Interview With Rick Flori
The Queensland Court of Appeal ruled on 3 December that a 2010 letter that well-known police corruption whistleblower Rick Flori had written to the state oversight body now referred to as the Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) was a valid...
Could NSW Police Officers Be Getting Off on Strip Searches?
It’s commonplace these days to hear the ever-increasing practice of strip searching the public likened to a form of state-sponsored sexual assault. And the thing with this sort of violation is perpetrators get off on it. State police watchdog the...
Officers Who Report Police Misconduct Must Be Protected, Court Rules
In late February 2010, the Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) received a public interest disclosure letter relating to the conduct of two police officers that then Queensland police sergeant Rick Flori asserted had been involved in official misconduct. The letter...