News and resources

Concerns regarding Border Force’s search powers It has been reported that the Australian Border Force searched more than 40,000 mobile phones and other data storage devices of travellers entering the country in just five years. During 2021, border officials demanded passwords to examine 822 mobile phones belonging to people entering the country, sometimes copying data […]

A case heard in 2015 concerned a series of bank withdrawals made possible by a human error which caused a glitch in the bank’s systems.

In March 2010 a 22-year-old customer of St George Bank opened a new account at the bank’s Goulburn branch. The new account was marketed – all too aptly, as it turned out – as a “Complete Freedom” account and was essentially a savings account with no overdraft facility.

However, the staff member who opened the account wrongly marked it as having a “relationship officer” assigned to it. The role of the bank’s relationship officers was to approve or disallow withdrawals beyond the available credit limit of the accounts for which they were responsible.

The bank did not normally assign relationship officers to retail accounts such as the Complete Freedom account. The absence of a relationship officer meant that the customer was able to withdraw money which he did not have.

In 2015, a very unusual murder trial was heard in the Victorian Supreme Court. The events unfolded when two men got into a fight and struggled over a gun. The gun went off and one of the men was shot in the head. The survivor claimed that that shot was fired by accident.

The victim collapsed on the floor and the surviving man saw the body twitch and jerk. The record of the police interview with the surviving man sets out what happened next.

Q: All right. And what happened after that?
A: Well, I couldn’t – I didn’t know what to do so – yeah, I didn’t want the bloke suffering so I shot him again, yeah, ’cause he wasn’t dead. Yeah.
Q: And so what happened then?
A: I don’t know. I went and looked at his room and found some more bullets, and I shot him again, yeah, to stop him from suffering.
Q: Yeah. So when you shot him that second time you said that that was so that he wouldn’t suffer.
A: ’Cause I wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead.

Before you could be called up for jury duty to decide the guilt or innocence of an accused, the fate of the person before the court was usually decided by a priest in the belief that God would intervene on behalf of the innocent. Court trials before juries existed In the past there was no […]

Mental health impairment and “not criminally responsible” verdicts In a recent court case, a man set a fire to a stranger’s house and laughed and cheered as the victim inside burned to death. The judge found that he had a mental health impairment and was not criminally responsible for murder. There was clear evidence Harley […]

One of the strangest defences that has been used in criminal trials is that the accused was asleep or sleepwalking when they committed the offence. Mens rea in the context of sleepwalking The legal term mens rea refers to criminal intent, requiring a person to have awareness or knowledge that they are doing wrong in […]

The Australian laws relating to murder, attempted murder and manslaughter are all state-based. However, in practice there is not a great deal of difference between the laws which cover these crimes in the different Australian territories and states. The definitions below are the legal definitions in New South Wales. What is murder? The offence of […]