Every weekend during the summer I used to drive my four children to the beach. Naturally we journeyed with all the windows open to offset the Queensland summer heat. The stream of fresh air created by the motion of the car, cooled and refreshed the passengers. Otherwise, without air-conditioning, the car would have quickly become an oven.
As my children matured this arrangement became less satisfying. My eldest daughter became a petulant and perverse teenager, who began to make family life a misery. She started to demand we keep the car windows shut to stop the wind disturbing her hair. And when this absurd request was ignored she sulked. Upon arrival at the beach Ruth would refuse to leave the vehicle and instead insisted upon moping in the back seat all day. This upset the other children who began to question the need for adequate ventilation in the car. Of course the sensible parents ignored their daughter's tantrums, and safe-guarded the family interests.
Succumbing to the odious dictates of the girl would have been like submitting to any other blackmail. The initial demand would have merely been the first of a series. Ruth would have become a tyrant, indulging her whims at the family expense. It would have been an injustice to reward this anti-social behaviour with anything but contempt.
Legal Support Of Tyranny
It is clear that the legal community has taken the opposite attitude, if an individual takes exception to general behaviour then public behaviour must be amended. If someone objects to other staff smoking, then smoking has to be forbidden for all staff. Naturally, having set this precedent, they have unleashed a barrage of similar insane claims. We can no longer smoke at work, or when we travel, or in a growing list of venues. And this is just the beginning, for we are going to be subject to the caprice of every malcontent.
Rewarding Cranks
Every social misfit must now feel encouraged to tyrannise society. By successfully suing authority they can indulge their foibles and win a large financial reward. The only requirement is to discover a medical condition that can be blamed upon someone else, then enlist the help of the legal profession. The disease of Asthma (or the material Asbestos) seems ideal as its applications are almost inexhaustible. Smoke, perfume, fumes, dust, pollen can provide an enterprising barrister with a job for life. Our justice corporation no longer protects society from cranks, but the reverse.
Proper Function Of Courts
This inversion is a contradiction of the function of the law. The legal code is designed to reflect communal morality, not to dictate behaviour. I trust my work mates not to steal my wallet from an unattended desk, not from fear of the police, but because they respect my property. It is not the threat of prison that keeps citizens lawful, but conscience. Law enforcement is ensured not by uniformed officers, but by upbringing that teaches common values.
What Is Justice
Penalties imposed by the courts are not to enforce correct behaviour by acting as a public threat, but to satisfy common notions of justice. Criminals are fined, imprisoned and executed because citizens believe that is what they deserve. Flogging was not meant to show someone the error of their ways, but to advertise the contempt the community felt towards a particular act. Nor was the enforced penalty meant to atone for the crime, for the criminal, if not executed, was considered henceforth as someone who could not be trusted.
Mass Compulsion Of Obedience To Law Is Tyranny
The courts are the servants of the people, sanctioned to publicly advertise accepted notions of justice. Once the courts have to employ officers to enforce mass compliance, they are no longer servants but masters. Such official compulsion is tyranny, whose application creates righteous indignation. This leads to antipathy towards the judiciary, contempt for the law and marks a reversal of the function of the courts.
Historical Lesson
The prohibition of alcohol in the USA during the 1930s was a graphic demonstration of this effect. Public wowserism was allowed to dictate laws that forbid the use of alcoholic refreshment. The result was a corrupt and incompetent administration, an explosion in crime creating powerful outlaws like Al Capone, and an increase in imbibing. A source of state revenue was lost, along with the control and scrutiny of the liquid being consumed by the public. Legislation purporting to improve public health and morality had the disastrously opposite effect, and achieved at increased cost to the taxpayers. The impact was so clear that the community quickly repealed the offending acts. But the lesson was ignored that the law cannot dictate, but only reflect, public morals.
Simple Lesson Ignored
Despite the awful example of prohibition, we are determined to repeat the effect. Popular anxieties about the recreational use of some substances have been allowed to infect legal process, and exactly the same result obtained. Administrations throughout the world have become corrupted by the effect of laws proscribing drug use. There has been an explosion in crime generated by consumer and merchant of the illicit product. Traffickers have become ever-more powerful, even challenging governments in their access to money and power. Trapped between their habit and the cost of the drugs, addicts are forced into crime.
Unable To Help Ourselves
Repealing the drug laws would produce immediate and significant community rewards. There would be a dramatic drop in petty crime, police corruption, the number of criminals, the load on the courts, the load on the prisons, and the financial cost to the country. Failure to take this step confirms the dominance of public prejudice in the face of the evidence; we are deluded.
Explosion Of Statutes
Instead of removing mad laws our citizens are blindly adding more to the list. An increase in citizens unable to comprehend the impossibility of forcing behaviour by law has produced a legislation explosion. Any area where popular feeling perceives injustice has become a reason to enact statutes. Fired by growing delusion our community is sprouting a continuous stream of absurd laws. (Also see the American experience, described in "The Death Of Commonsense" by Philip Howard.)
Spreading Prohibition
The prohibition effect is being extended to every facet of human affairs. Thou shalt not be racist, sexist, bigoted, unfair, or display any quality of human frailty, real or imagined. The inevitable result being an increase in the proscribed activity, increased community costs, and the serious erosion of authority.
Absurdity Of Excuses
In frequent demonstrations of madness, irrational arguments have been advanced to justify the most absurd regulations, for example the Racial Vilification law. This unprecedented statute can gain the community nothing, but it destroys freedom of speech. Few communications have only a single interpretation, hence the need for lawyers and contracts. But now a particular interpretation of ordinary chit-chat can make the author liable to legal penalty. The law is demanding that all citizens have their words censored before expressing them, or face the consequences. It is a monument to the death of reason and marks the beginning of outright tyranny.
Discarding Of Rules Of Evidence
To facilitate the detection and prosecution of offenders discovered by this massive extension of the legal code, the rules of evidence have been compromised. The word of a single individual is now sufficient to condemn the hapless accused; otherwise the esoteric nature of the new rules would prevent guilt ever being proved.
Courts Rely On Word Alone
Sex without consent is a crime, thus penetration of a vagina while a female is intoxicated, or not fully awake, or has suddenly changed her mind, has officially been deemed rape. Male citizens may find themselves thrown into prison on the uncorroborated evidence of anyone claiming rape. A case circa 1991 in the UK saw a man imprisoned for rape, then released when his female accuser later confessed to perjury and became imprisoned in turn. A similar pattern to a case in Australia where Kevin Neil Ibbs, 49, was jailed for four years in 1987 for taking up to 30 seconds to stop having sex with a friend of his wife after she told him it was wrong. His former wife, Katrina Ann Carter, of Noosa Heads, Queensland, and her friend, Christine Elizabeth Watson, of Ambarvale, NSW, were jailed in 1997 for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice after admitting they plotted to have Ibbs charged with rape. The matter was not finally resolved until Thursday, 22nd March 2001 when the West Australian Court of Criminal Appeal unanimously overturned his conviction.
Guilty Unless Proven Innocent
Our community now shares the justice system in vogue during the Spanish Inquisition. To be accused of a crime against popular causes, that is to contradict contemporary (circa 2000) reverence for children, women, non-white races etc. is to be guilty, unless innocence can be proven. Though evidence for the prosecution is no longer tortured out of the accused the torrent of claims that pours out of the accuser is sufficient.
Courts Support Modern Myths
Devils and satanic possession have been replaced by their imaginary modern equivalent — psychological trauma. For just as no medieval court could deny the existence of Satan and evil agents, no contemporary court dare dispute alleged undetectable mental wounds.
Courts Support False Claims
The result repeats the atmosphere of The Spanish Inquisition; no one is safe. Any party who can see gain in making allegations, real or imagined, is now free to indulge this appetite. Legal processes have become the arena of lunatics and charlatans. An influence that is being promoted by the courts throughout the society.
Courts Reward Informers
Priests who have dedicated their lives to the church and charity now find themselves especially vulnerable. Regardless of their efforts or achievements, if one of their previous juvenile charges should claim some sexual interference, they are doomed. Their disgrace justified by the alleged mental anguish suffered by the accuser.
Justice No Longer Seen
The general deterioration of legal procedure must be obvious to all those who believe that justice must be seen to be done. The media reveal case after case where the name of the accused cannot be revealed, along with the names of witnesses and sometimes even that of the magistrate. A case reported on 2nd July 1994 had the police refusing to identify the gunman who trapped 19 people inside a Sydney community centre. Officers said the name would not be released in accordance with official policy regarding suicide. A statement presuming the verdict of the coroner and denying our right to know who committed the crime.
Law Attacks Ordinary Citizens
Secrecy is not just being extended to criminals and courts but to the actions of general law enforcement. Any citizen can discover they have been penalised without warning for breaking some statute. They exceeded the speed limit, or drove through a red light, committing crimes only the robot camera noticed. The humiliation and shame of public arrest can be earned by relaxing with friends, one drink too many and the surprise attack of the Random Breath detector team is sufficient. Surreptitiously the law attacks ordinary citizens turning them into criminals without the existence of a single victim.
Law No Longer Protects, But Threatens, Private Property
Once owning your own home supplied some kind of security, but this has been undermined by recent interpretations of law. The ability to sue for damages under the slightest pretext has now (circa 2000) become an industry for unscrupulous lawyers. An associate of mine was suddenly faced (December 2000) with a judgement of $30,000 to cover the damages inflicted when her pet dog bit a woman on her leg. The wound was not large or unusual but only what would be expected from such a trivial incident, but this was sufficient excuse for the victim to demand a huge compensation. Naturally if my friend had been without property the case would never have been brought, but because she had some property it was worthwhile for the victim to use the law to steal this property from my friend.
Awarded Compensation Incomprehensible
Even when injury is the fault of the victim, the court may find the innocent property owners liable for damages. Somehow the absent owners were deemed by a Brisbane supreme court to be 70% responsible for their houseguest breaking his neck by electing to dive off their fence into a shallow canal. This judgement was quickly overturned on appeal as incomprehensible, but this has done little to stem the growing numbers of such cases using alleged injury as a legal excuse to steal. Naturally this trend (to avoid responsibility by blaming someone else) has caused insurance premiums to rise, and the increase is so large that the Australian Federal government is proposing to limit such claims by legislation.
Sue The World
Having obtained global patents an Australian firm based in Melbourne has won the right to dictate who in the world studies none-coding DNA, and how much they should pay for the privilege. The law now demands that any research done using none-coding DNA must first be licensed by Genetic Technologies Limited or the researcher faces being sued for breach of patent. Dr Mervyn Jacobson, the founder and executive chairman of Genetic Technologies is currently (2003) touring the world demanding money with menaces. The New Zealand Health System has been given an ultimatum to either pay Genetic Technologies a once up fee of NZ $10 million and a annual license fee of NZ $2 million, or face a breach of licence claim in the courts. Six prominent American firms have yielded to similar demands with the last paying $3.2 million US.
The Law Supports A Protection Racket
Nothing is actually obtained by paying the extortion demanded by Dr Jacobson, for the patent covers knowledge that was "well known by the mid-1980s", says Professor Joe Sambrook, author of the standard textbook on none-coding genetics. John Mattock, the leading expert on none-coding DNA asserts the patent should "never have been granted". Nevertheless the patent was granted and Dr Jacobson took the prudent step of buying insurance to cover litigation costs incurred in enforcing his patent in the courts. The law is now an agency for a worldwide protection racket.
Law Protects Criminals
In contrast to this absurd legal contriving to persecute ordinary citizens, the legal corporation now finds ways of avoiding punishing offenders of long established laws. According to police figures people have given up murder by poison. This wonderful improvement in human nature has been achieved without encouragement, and despite the increase in availability of toxic mixtures. The obvious possibility that cremation is hiding these homicides (see Shipman Case) is ignored; a failure of detection revealing either official stupidity or callous disregard or both.
Law Protects Bank Robbers
Ignoring serious crime is not the result of official indifference but is part of a deliberate trend. On 17th December 1993 an undercover policeman who robbed banks to pay for his heroin habit was released without penalty by the Brisbane district court. Judge Botting declared the discomfiture that accompanies jail was too awful for the ex-policeman, Mostafa Shehab, to endure. This is nonsense. If an individual chooses to commit a crime it is with the certain knowledge of the risk of prison, and as a police officer this would have been especially clear. Shehab's chosen profession is trusted to uphold the law, so officers must be exemplary in their general behaviour, with any breach attracting stiffer penalty than usual, not the reverse. For the courts to condone this behaviour by not imposing sentence, is lunacy. It is a contradiction of the ostensible purpose of the courts: a glaring injustice. The lack of any official rejection of this gross perversion of law only confirms the absurdity of our legal bureaucracy.
Law Protects Juvenile Delinquents
In Townsville during December 1993, a man was bound over for assaulting a child. The little hoodlum had been constantly tormenting his dog, so he eventually chastised the culprit by shaking him. The court could not stop the child (also see UK judicial impotence) but it attacked the dog-owner for protecting his pet.
Law Protects Juvenile Armed Robber
On 3rd August 1998, a schoolboy armed with a .22 rifle attempted to hold up a grocery store in Turpin's Road, Labrador. The shopkeeper immediately produced his own .22 rifle and fired a shot over the shoulder of the youth, who promptly fled. The result was that on 19th March, 1999 in a Gold Coast court, the area's most senior judge sentenced the offender, who could not be named despite having two prior convictions for stealing, to 50 hours' community service and two years' probation during which he had to continue his schooling and attend anger management courses. And Judge John Hanger, after speaking sternly to the youth, refused to record a conviction. Whereas the victim, Mr Barry James Wood, 60, was fined $250 in the Southport's magistrates court in October 1998 for possessing an unlicensed firearm, which he was forced to surrender.
Following the attempted robbery, the shopkeeper who has now been publicly identified and disarmed, asked the community just how he should defend himself against robbery, or should he just hand over his money on demand? No answer was received from either the local police or the judges who heard the associated matters, a silence that emphasises the unjust and unreasonable nature of contemporary judicial proceedings.
Even If Juveniles Murder
This immediately raises the question of how adults can stop harassment from juveniles, even when it may eventually lead to their death. On Boxing day, 1991 in Perth, a pregnant mother and one-year-old son were killed by a young hoodlum speeding in a stolen car. The offending under-age driver had a record of over two hundred previous offences, demonstrating a complete disregard for the law; a result confirming the inability of that office to control this outlaw. The deaths of these two innocent people were the direct result of police impotence.
Juveniles Considered Sacred And Not To Be Punished
Despite being unable to protect citizens from juvenile delinquents, the authorities will attack anyone who defends themselves. This is a repeat of the attitude of many parents in the community who refuse to discipline their own children, despite their crimes, while preventing anyone else from repairing this inadequacy.
Law Protects Armed Lunatics
While shaking odious children is penalised, holding a law firm captive for fifteen hours with a sawn-off .303 in Brisbane is all right. On 11th December 1993 a magistrate's court discontinued the prosecution of Richard Werner Stein because he was undergoing treatment at a mental institution.
Law Protects Criminals From Consequences
The changing emphasis in law was dramatically demonstrated in England in late 1993 when a London court declared a young couple were not guilty of causing the death of their landlord. Being set upon, bound and kidnapped had caused the victim to die from heart failure but the assailants were judged not responsible, as this result could not be foreseen.
Sixty years previously the law was interpreted in a very different fashion. Then anyone committing a crime resulting in the demise of a victim was deemed a murderer. So when an old man died in hospital from pneumonia, months after being admitted for being struck on the head, the fatality was considered murder. The gentleman who struck the blow was promptly promoted from thief to murderer and hung. The two opposing decisions reflect a complete change in attitude.
Not only do murderers no longer suffer capital punishment, the courts search for an excuse to allow the offenders to escape any punishment; and Australia is no exception to this ludicrous stance.
Law Protects Murderess
Robyn Bella Kina, an alcoholic prostitute already convicted for stabbing her sister, was released from jail by a Brisbane court on 29th November 1993, despite having confessed to murdering her common law husband. Following a fair trial and subsequent sentence there was a belated public outcry claiming justice had miscarried. Stabbing to death her consort was permissible because his behaviour warranted execution, or so the court of appeal implied.
If a wife discovers married life to be unbearable she can always desert the partnership. Staying with a tormentor is condoning the torture, so no long-term behaviour of a spouse should ever be used to justify murder, despite its unpleasant nature. To allow women to kill their husbands for such reasons is to condone divorce by murder.
Kina is a confessed murderess and deserves the full penalty of the law. The actions she claimed caused her to stab her partner to death were in keeping with the nature of her marriage. It is difficult to see a clear division between events occurring well before the homicide and the particular act used to justify the killing. She was well aware of her partner's habits and behaviour, yet did not avail herself of any opportunity to escape the relationship.
Court Ignores Precedent
To set aside a previous court ruling for cultural, psychological and personal reasons is to ignore centuries of legal precedent. The court is now accepting stupidity, cowardice and superstition as justifiable excuses for breaking the law. Releasing this convicted killer not only placed the community at risk but condoned husband killing.
Court Supports Divorce By Murder
Clearly if a wife can win popular support for resentment of her husband's activities, his life may be forfeit. A stance that can only destabilise the institution of marriage, if not the whole community.
Schneider Case
In New South Wales, at Leeton police station on 30th November 1988, a junior policewoman produced a pistol and shot dead another officer. Sheree Ann Schneider claimed it was an accident. Satisfied the pistol was unloaded, she pulled the trigger without looking where the gun was pointed. The charge of Felonious Assault was dismissed in the lower court on 28th July 1989 under section 41 (vi) - the presiding officer ruled that no jury would convict. Use Of A Firearm In Disregard For Another Person's Safety was dismissed on 27th April 1990. The female did not even lose her job, presumably her fellow officers hope she will be more careful in future.
Court Ignores Duty
It is axiomatic with all weapons training that they never be pointed at anyone unless they are intended to be used, even in jest. Deliberately pulling the trigger without looking where the .38 pistol was pointed was criminal irresponsibility. Sharon Wilson was killed as the result of criminal negligence; a failure that should not be tolerated from any citizen, much less a police officer. Not knowing the gun was loaded is no excuse for anyone, least of all a trained professional. For the courts to fail to penalise this action is to commit more crimes; the denial of the importance of duty and the magnitude of taking a life.
The Law Repeats The Role Of Indulgent Parents
Schneider escaped penalty by adopting the infantile excuse that she was merely the hapless victim of the inadequate police weapons training program; that this was accepted by the authorities is not an aberration. Trial for murder is no longer a matter of resolving fact; it has become a re-enactment of the spoilt child caught by their indulgent parents; if the miscreant can deflect blame while generating sympathy then all is forgiven. In 1996 in America, a man charged with murdering his ex-wife and her lover was acquitted despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. O.J. Simpson persuaded jurors that the evidence of his guilt had been manufactured by racist police, and the trial became an interrogation, not of the accused, but of the witnesses. It was a repeat of the nursery cry he is just saying I did it because he hates me.
There There You Poor Child
Playing the role of sympathetic mother, Judge Newton told the Southport District Court on 6th January 2000 that he would not add to the suffering of a convicted thief and allowed him to walk free from his court. A judgement made to demonstrate the court's sympathy for the fact that this criminal had been raped in gaol some fourteen years ago when he was 13 years old.
He Made Me Do It
The New South Wales Supreme Court sitting in Newcastle, on 31st July 1997 found Dean Waters was not guilty of murder, despite his confession, which was never questioned, that he had gunned down the victim, Alan Hall, in 1988. The guilty party identified by the court was not the killer, but his father, Ces Waters; the deceased parent was adjudged to have brain washed his 35-year-old son into committing this dreadful act. A successful invoking of the child's excuse he made me do it.
How Could You Punish Me For Doing This?
After a two week sitting of the same institution, the jury took just 33 minutes on 1st August 1997 in Darlinghurst, to acquit a former Sydney detective of murder. A decision that ignored Said Morgan's confession that he had slaughtered the victim on May 26th, 1995. The 31-year-old accused man repeatedly told the court he killed the victim because that man had sexually molested his relatives, and he would repeat his action "without a doubt" in the same circumstances. The defence put forward for the crime of murder was just an appeal to the jury's feelings towards children.
Courts Fail To Interpret The Evidence Correctly
The judicial process is now so unreliable as to sometimes fail to interpret the evidence correctly. Such incompetence was revealed by two coronial enquiries concerning the same incident, the deaths of two women at Atherton, Northern Queensland, in July 1991. Both claimed that the evidence allowed only one verdict, that of murder followed by suicide, but neither coroner could explain the death scene nor how he knew that no-one else was involved; an ignorance that immediately contradicts their verdict and demands an "open" finding.
Courts Pervert The Course Of Justice
Twelve years after the sexual assault and murder of 17-month-old Deidre Kennedy in April 1973, Raymond John Carroll was convicted of the crime. Central to the prosecution's case in February 1985 was that three dental experts, using separate methods, each claimed that the accused was the only man who could have made the bite marks discovered on the toddler's corpse. This was one of the very reasons that three appeal court judges subsequently ruled that the guilty verdict be quashed and the accused acquitted. Using compelling evidence of guilt as proof of innocence is a perversion of justice. This judgement by justices Andrews, Kneipp, and Shepherdson marked them as fools or knaves. (also see Mabo edict).
The Court's Authority The Same As Modern Parents
These demonstrations of jurisprudence reveal the courts have become corrupted by public selfishness and are now impotent and deluded. They no longer:
— but merely echo the morality of convenience that now dominates the community.
The Courts Are Now Insane
To recoil from truth is to recoil from sanity, so when the courts judged that:
— they were not just upholding injustice but revealing they are insane.
The instrument used to enforce justice and reason in Australia, if not the Western world, has become corrupted by delusion. This decay has robbed our community of sanity: criminals are protected while ordinary citizens penalised. Our executors of justice, without fear or favour, have become our deranged persecutors, discovering and penalising imaginary crime, while acquitting real criminals. The guilty have become innocent, and the innocent guilty.