The High Court and the facts of sentencing: Nguyen v R and Betts v R

Australia’s law students are currently sitting their first semester exams. Some of them might be examining hypotheticals like this one:

D shot and wounded the V, who was a police officer, while V was lawfully executing a search warrant in company with other police officers on premises in close proximity to D’s home. The shot struck V in the arm, thereby causing him a serious but non-fatal gunshot wound. In the course of the fire-fight which ensued, one of the other police officers fired a shot which was intended for D, but which unfortunately instead hit V in the neck, thereby inflicting a wound from which he later died. Assume that when D fired at V, D honestly believed that V was someone posing as a police officer who was intent on robbing the D and might have posed a serious risk to the D’s safety.

That exam question could earn the examiner congratulations for her inventiveness, but the next one would probably earn her a meeting with her Dean:

D moved to stab V in the chest but she asked him not to stab her there and he rolled her over and stabbed her a number of times in the back. V believed her only chance to escape was to calm D and weaken him. She said, “If we are going to do this together, then I should have a turn with the knife.” The tip of the knife D then had had broken and was embedded in V’s back so D grabbed another knife from the kitchen, handed it to V and said “Okay” and lay on his back. V stabbed D in the stomach, giving an extra shove to make sure the knife was in deep and she twisted it. It appeared that some of D’s intestines came out, D remarking “That was a good one.”

Adding further details – that D was a former contest on Australian Survivor and that, during D’s attack, a real estate agent entered the flat to open it for inspection, saw ‘red liquid’ everywhere, and left, seemingly without calling the police – may well leave the lecturer without a job. But, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said, ‘the difference between fact and fiction is that fiction must be believable.’ Or, as the late Han Solo said, ‘it’s true, all of it’.

The victims of crime in the above two cases were Bill Crews, a 26 year-old police constable whose parents recounted to the coroner their surprise and pride when their son told them three years earlier that he had got in to the police force and then sat and watched video of his last moments, and Samantha Holland, aged 23 at the time, who was stabbed at least 26 times before she escaped over a balcony and will suffer physical and psychological scars for life, and who sobbed in court as her ex-boyfriend was sentenced. The defendants were Phillip Nguyen, then 55, whose first wife was murdered a decade earlier and whose second marriage failed while he was on remand for killing Crews, and Joel Betts, then 30, a victim of childhood sexual abuse and violence who faces a lifetime of incontinence due to the bowel injury he incurred while stabbing Holland. Each recently lost their final appeals in the High Court. Because both defendants pleaded guilty, the Court’s task was not the criminal law student’s task of applying the rules of criminal responsibility to these strange facts. Rather, the nation’s top judges faced an infinitely harder task: assessing whether the punishment each offender was given fitted their unusual crimes. Continue reading

News: Latest special leave cycle yields five new appeals

The past month has produced five grants of special leave, as follows:

  • 25th May (non-oral): 2 grants, no refusals (Nettle & Gordon JJ)
  • 9th June (non-oral; 8 unrepresented matters, 1 represented): no grants, 9 refusals (Nettle & Gordon JJ)
  • 15th June (non-oral; 11 unrepresented, 10 represented): no grants, 21 refusals (Kiefel & Keane JJ)
  • 17th June (non-oral, 6 unrepresented, 4 represented, 1 unknown): 1 grant, 10 refusals (Bell & Gageler JJ)
  • 17th June (oral): 2 grants, 4 refusals

This month continues the previous trend of non-oral matters being divided amongst three pairs of geographically linked judges, i.e. the Victorian judges (Nettle & Gordon JJ), the Queensland judges (Kiefel & Keane JJ, who received a double load this month) and the NSW/ACT judges (Bell & Gageler JJ), with French CJ again not participating in any non-oral leave matters. Presumably, these pairings suit practical arrangements within the Court, but they also potentially skew leave grants, to the extent that these various pairs see things eye to eye more than other pairs (or French CJ.) The oral matters continue to also be heard by pairs of judges (rather than three, as might be expected if two judges had previously disagreed on the written merits), but the oral pairs don’t match the non-oral ones. This month also sees the Court’s listings all referring to ‘matters for determination’, rather than for publication of reasons or not, and hence no longer indicating results in advance of the Court’s sittings.

The five matters granted leave to appeal are as follows: Continue reading

Betts v The Queen

The High Court has dismissed an appeal against a sentencing decision of the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal after it allowed an appeal against sentence because of errors in the characterisation of aggravating factors. The appellant was convicted of attempted murder and kidnapping following a murder-suicide attempt on his former partner, in which he repeatedly stabbed her over a prolonged period of time, and sentenced to 16 years imprisonment with a non-parole period of 11 years. Continue reading

Alqudsi v The Queen

The High Court has dismissed a motion on a cause removed from the New South Wales Supreme Court relating to constitutional requirements for trials in the context of a trial for terrorism recruitment offences. The applicant is charged with seven offences against s 7(1)(e) of the Crimes (Foreign Incursions and Recruitment) Act 1978 (Cth), which makes it an offence for a person to give money, goods or services to a person or body for the purpose of supporting or promoting the commission of an incursion into a foreign country to engage in hostilities (on which see also s 6 of the Act). Pursuant to s 132 of the Criminal Procedure Act 1986 (NSW), the applicant made a motion to be tried by a judge only. Section 80 of the Commonwealth Constitution, however, provides that trials on indictment for Commonwealth offences ‘shall be by jury’. Following an application by the Commonwealth Attorney-General, French CJ ordered that part of the cause be removed into the High Court to determine the following question:

Are ss 132(1) to (6) of the Criminal Procedure Act 1986 (NSW) incapable of being applied to the Applicant’s trial by s 68 of the Judiciary Act 1903 (Cth) because their application would be inconsistent with s 80 of the Constitution?

Continue reading

Hall v Hall

The High Court has dismissed an appeal from the Full Family Court on spousal maintenance and the meaning of support and ‘financial resources’ under the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth). In late 2013, the primary judge made an interim spousal maintenance order of approximately $10,000 per month pending the final determination of a property settlement and maintenance proceedings between the appellant wife and respondent husband, on the basis that the wife was ‘unable to support herself adequately’ as per s 72 of the Family Law Act. The recently deceased father of the wife had expressed a ‘wish’ that she be paid $150,000 per year Continue reading

Robinson Helicopter Co Inc v McDermott

The High Court has allowed an appeal against a decision of the Queensland Court of appeal on negligence and manufacturer’s liability for defective goods in the context of a helicopter crash. The first respondent was severely injured in 2004 when a helicopter manufactured by the appellant crashed due to a loose bolt in the helicopter’s flexplate. The respondents claimed that the maintenance manual provided by the appellants gave inadequate instructions on the method for checking the tightness of the bolts, contrary to the law of negligence and ss 75AD and AE of the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth). The trial judge found that the manual was adequate in requiring torque seals Continue reading

Dictators, Discretion and Systems of Public Law: Bell Group NV (in liq) v Western Australia

By Martin Clark

Bell Group Case Page

The High Court’s judgment in Bell Group was a nice rendition of the well-told story about s 109 of the Constitution. Section 109 provides that ‘[w]hen a law of a State is inconsistent with a law of the Commonwealth, the latter shall prevail, and the former shall, to the extent of the inconsistency, be invalid.’ Western Australian passed a law to create a body that was empowered to finally determine the liabilities owed to various creditors of the Bell Group companies in the fallout of their liquidation, the long saga of which is detailed by Katy Barnett here and here. The High Court held that this law was invalid because it conflicted with the federal tax laws, which created the rights of and liabilities owed to another government and another office holder in relation to these companies: the Commonwealth and the federal Commissioner of Taxation. As I wrote shortly after the decision came down, the plurality judges (French CJ, Kiefel, Bell, Keane, Nettle and Gordon JJ) held that:

The Authority’s purportedly absolute discretion to determine the existence of a liability of a WA Bell Company and to quantify that liability and the Governor’s powers to extinguish liabilities that would otherwise be owed to the Commonwealth meant that the Bell Act effectively created a scheme that stripped the Commonwealth’s tax debts of their existence, quantification, enforceability and recovery under the Tax Acts (at [57]–[60]). Because it overrides the Commonwealth’s rights under the Tax Acts as a creditor of the WA Bell Companies, the Bell Act alters, impairs or detracts from the rights accrued to the Commonwealth under the Tax Acts (at [61]).

The day after the High Court handed down Bell Group I heard the eminent British historian Gareth Stedman-Jones speak on the meaning of ‘dictatorship’. What followed was a great rendition (which I’ll recollect poorly shortly) of a well-told story in the history of political thought — the origins and development of the office of ‘dictator’ in Rome and beyond.

In this post, I attempt to make the otherwise fairly routine decision in Bell Group a little more interesting by framing it around the content of Stedman-Jones’s paper. This might seem a bit esoteric: what could the two have to do with each other? But I think that bringing Bell Group and the idea of ‘dictator’ together suggest one way in which the case is interesting: as a modern Australian episode in the long global history of the relation between discretion and systems of law. That relation is of fundamental importance to public law in general, and reflects some foundational aspects of the Australian constitutional system that were at play in Bell Group. Continue reading