This blog reported when Rugby league star Jarryd Hayne was found guilty of two counts of sexual intercourse without consent.
Hayne had pleaded not guilty and denied sexually assaulting the then 26-year-old woman at her home at Fletcher, on Newcastle’s outskirts, in September 2018.
His first trial in Newcastle last year ended in a hung jury, however the jury in his second trial found him guilty of performing oral and digital sex on the complainant without her consent.
Continue reading “Jarryd Hayne’s convictions quashed on appeal”
Generally, indictable offences in Queensland are dealt with by the District or Supreme Courts, as they are usually serious offences. However, in some cases, indictable offences can or must be dealt with in the Magistrates Court.
Continue reading “Indictable offences dealt with in the Magistrates Court of Queensland”
Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell has been convicted of sex trafficking after a New York jury deliberated for more than five days.
Maxwell was accused of recruiting and grooming four teenagers for Epstein between 1994 and 2004. Epstein committed suicide in a Manhattan jail cell as he awaited trial on sex abuse charges of his own.
Maxwell was found guilty by a 12-person jury of five of the six counts she was facing.
“A unanimous jury has found Ghislaine Maxwell guilty of one of the worst crimes imaginable — facilitating and participating in the sexual abuse of children,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement following the verdict. “I want to commend the bravery of the girls — now grown women — who stepped out of the shadows and into the courtroom. Their courage and willingness to face their abuser made this case, and today’s result, possible.”
She could potentially spend the rest of her life behind bars.
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American actor Jussie Smollett has been found guilty by a jury of faking a hate crime against himself.
Continue reading “Jussie Smollett found guilty of fake race hate crime hoax”
Cameron McKenzie has been removed from the roll of lawyers after his conviction for extortion.
Extortion
In 15 January 2017, then Ipswich Mayor Paul Pisasale had a number of telephone calls with the complainant Xin Li falsely purporting to be a private investigator and demanding that the complainant pay a sum of money to Yutian Li, a woman the complainant had had a relationship with. Pisasale threatened to cause detriment to the complainant, including by having him subjected to court proceedings, being sued for $200,000, incurring costs of $20,000 in court, being subjected to the adverse publicity of court proceedings and being summoned to go to court.
Continue reading “Ipswich lawyer Cameron McKenzie struck off for extortion”
On 25 February 2021 at 11.51 pm, refugee activist Shane Bazzi published a tweet on Twitter containing the words:
“Peter Dutton is a rape apologist.”
This tweet contained a link to an article published online in The Guardian Newspaper on 20 June 2019. The link in that tweet showed a large photograph of Mr Dutton, the name “The Guardian” and the following words:
“Peter Dutton says women using rape and abortion claims as ploy to ge…
Home Affairs minister says ‘some people are trying it on’ in an attempt to get to Australia from refugee centres on Nauru.”
The first of these lines comprised part of the headline to The Guardian article. The second constituted the whole of the first sentence in the article.
Continue reading “Peter Dutton wins defamation case”
The Sydney Morning Herald reports:
“Former federal Labor MP Craig Thomson will spend the night behind bars after he was arrested over allegations he facilitated more than 130 fraudulent visa applications over four years, resulting in more than $2 million of financial gains…
“Mr Thomson was arrested at his Terrigal residence on Wednesday and charged with multiple offences, including 19 counts of providing false documents and false or misleading information, five counts of a prohibition on asking for or receiving a benefit in return for the occurrence of a sponsorship-related event, two counts of obtaining a financial advantage by deception and one count of dealing with proceeds of crime.
He was refused bail at Gosford Police Station and his matter will be heard before Gosford Local Court on Thursday.”
Continue reading “Former Labor MP Craig Thomson arrested and remanded over visa fraud allegations”
At about 1.00 am on Sunday 17 February 2019, police were patrolling in Rockhampton when they saw a car driving erratically and knocking over a street sign. They pulled the car over and found the driver was Douglas “call me Doug” Winning, a local solicitor.
What transpired was recorded on the officer’s body-worn cameras. All class, Winning was wearing only a pair of shorts. His vehicle had sustained damage on the bonnet where the sign had hit and there was damage to a front tyre. When asked that he had been drinking, Winning nominated the amount as “a bottle of rum”, explaining that he had had a sleep since finishing it. He was slurring his words. He twice said “You’re not going to pinch me”.
One of the officers said she was going to administer a roadside breath test. Winning was in the car holding his passport and $300 in cash, made up of six $50 notes. At the conclusion of the roadside breath test, Winning lifted his hands. He put his passport down on the seat beside him, and held up his right hand with the notes in it, saying: “Can’t pay my way out this, can I?”.
Continue reading “Winning Winner Douglas Dinner loses corruption conviction appeal”
“During the longest period of human history—so-called prehistorical times—the value or disvalue of an action was derived from its consequences: the action itself was considered as little as its origin, it was rather the way a distinction or disgrace still reaches back today from a child to its parents, in China, it was the retroactive force of success or failure that led men to think well or ill of an action… In the last ten thousand years, however, one has reached the point, step by step, in a few large regions on the earth, where it is no longer the consequences but the origin of an action that one allows to decide its value… one came to agree that the value of an action lay in the value of the intention. The intention as the whole origin and prehistory of an action: almost to the present day this prejudice dominated moral praise, blame, judgment, and philosophy on earth.— But today—shouldn’t we have reached the necessity of once more resolving on a reversal and fundamental shift in values, owing to another self-examination of man, another growth in profundity—do we not stand at the threshold of a period which should be designated negatively, to begin with, as extra-moral: today, is not the suspicion growing, at least among us immoralists, that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in what is unintentional in it, while everything about it that is intentional, everything about it that can be seen, known, “conscious,” still belongs to its surface and skin—which, like every skin, betrays something but conceals even more? In short, we believe that the intention is merely a sign and symptom that still requires interpretation, moreover, a sign that means too much and therefore, taken by itself alone, almost nothing—that morality in the traditional sense, the morality of intentions, was a prejudice, precipitate and perhaps provisional, something on the order of astrology and alchemy, but in any case something that must be overcome.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Continue reading “The problems with section 102NA of the Family Law Act 1975”
The failure by a judge of the Family Court of Western Australia to refrain from communicating with Counsel for one of the parties in a matter he was to deliver judgment in has resulted in the High Court reaffirming the principles set out in Ebner v The Official Trustee in Bankruptcy.
Continue reading “High Court holds contact with Counsel amounts to apprehension of bias”