Page 2504 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 June 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mr Hargreaves): Excuse me, Mrs Dunne. Stop the clock. Ladies and gentlemen in the gallery, would you have your discussions outside please. There is too much noise. Mrs Dunne, you have the floor.
MRS DUNNE: As I said before, Mr Assistant Speaker, it was clear that Mr Corbell had no intention of changing even a single punctuation mark in this bill. Mr Corbell did nothing other than pay lip-service to stakeholder engagement. It is, as usual, a Clayton’s consultation, a consultation of the most cynical kind. That is the first failure of this bill.
Before Mr Corbell makes any kind of claim that the Canberra Liberals are in some way opposed to jury trials or in some way opposed to proper law reform, let me make it perfectly clear that the Canberra Liberals believe that almost every criminal trial for an indictable offence in the ACT should be conducted by a jury. As I have said on a number of occasions in this place, the role of juries has stood us in good stead continuously for more than seven centuries, and has become a well-established, well-respected, well-loved and credible means by which offenders may be judged by their peers.
Jury trials are an opportunity created for the community to have an active involvement in the criminal justice system. The Australian constitution gives pre-eminence to jury trials and the High Court has underscored that pre-eminence. But there are times, rare numbers of times, when a jury may not be best placed to make a fair judgement.
It was on that premise that the former and now late Attorney-General Terry Connolly in 1993 introduced amendments to the Supreme Court Act to enable offenders to make an election for a judge-alone trial. The legislation that Mr Connolly introduced was based on the model then in use in South Australia and still in use there today. In presenting his bill, Mr Connolly set the parameters for the circumstances in which a judge-alone trial might be appropriate. He said:
Such cases might include those where extensive pre-trial publicity could be perceived as prejudicing jurors against the accused, and cases where there is a large amount of technical evidence that jurors might find difficult to comprehend.
So Mr Connolly was not advocating that judge-alone trials should become the norm. He suggested that there were special circumstances in which a jury trial may not result in a fair trial for the accused. Indeed, the Supreme Court Act makes it very clear, at section 68A, that it considers jury trials for criminal proceedings to be pre-eminent.
The thing that the Supreme Court Act does not do is to create the kinds of gates or guidelines that Mr Connolly suggested in his presentation speech. It gives clear and unfettered right to the accused to elect to proceed to a judge-alone trial. All the accused has to do in ACT law is to show that he has taken legal advice on the issue, that he has made the election freely and that he makes the election before the trial date is set.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video