“Here are your blindfolds,” said one of the managers, opening the door and handing the children three pieces of black cloth. The Baudelaires suspected he was Ernest, as he hadn’t bothered to say ‘Hello.’ “Blindfolds?” Violet asked. “Everyone wears blindfolds at a High Court trial,” the manager replied, “except the judges, of course. Haven’t you heard the expression ‘Justice is blind’?”
Tony Strickland, according to Wikipedia, is a former Californian legislator who twice failed to make the jump to the US Congress. Strickland’s fellow High Court appellant, Donald Galloway, has a longer entry in the Internet’s encyclopaedia thanks to his prominent roles in 1960s procedural Ironside and 1980s soap General Hospital. The third man arrested alongside them on Friday 1 July 2011 doesn’t satisfy Wikipedia’s significance criterion; however, Google reveals that one Edmund Hodges is seeking a female penpal willing to overlook his imprisonment for a dramatic Chicago bank heist. Joining Strickland, Galloway and Hodges at the apex court is Rick Tucker, who was charged nearly two years after the others and whose name appears alongside Buddy Holly’s and Roy Orbison’s on various YouTube clips.
The only thing that the ex-legislator, ex-actor, ex-heister and ex-singer actually have in common is that their names were generated by one of the following websites:
Victoria’s Court of Appeal uses these sites ‘to comply with the state’s ubiquitous suppression laws, while avoiding the ‘alphabet soup’ problem posed by using initials instead. As Gageler J explains in Strickland (a pseudonym); Galloway (a pseudonym); Hodges (a pseudonym); Tucker (a pseudonym) v Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions & Ors [2018] HCA 53, the quartet’s pseudonyms are courtesy of ‘orders of the Supreme Court of Victoria, unchallenged in the appeals and made for reasons not revealed in the appellate record.’
All we really know about the four appellants is that they are either managers or employees of two companies that were given the (soupy) pseudonyms XYZ Ltd and QRS Ltd, presumably to the chagrin of a colour management company in Clayton South and a third party support company in Worcestershire. While all four men have appeared twice in Victoria Court of Appeal judgments in 2014 and 2017, the High Court judgment is the first time we learnt what they were actually arrested for in 2011 and 2013; Gageler J and Edelman J reveal that all four were charged with the federal offence of conspiracy to bribe a foreign public official and that three (excluding Tucker) were also charged with the Victorian offence of dishonestly falsifying a document for an accounting purpose. Each offence carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison.
Well, there are two more things we now know. Justice Edelman quotes Strickland’s own counsel as admitting that the four were ‘”sharks”, not “minnows”‘. And a majority of the High Court has ruled that none of these sharks can ever be tried for their alleged crimes. Continue reading