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 →

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 →