We have all been the victim of some form of discrimination at one point or another. However this is the face of injustice via the Victorian justice system. The photo is of Farah Jama who was wrongfully convicted of rape and then served 15 months in prison based on contaminated DNA testing. Now Mr Jama is a Somali man who is a Muslim. He has some factors against him when he denied that was anywhere near the crime scene and the result the jury did not trust him or his family.
This case demonstrates how important the criminal investigation phase of the justice system is.
'Innocent until proven guilty' is an essential principle in the legal system that ensures everyone is believed to be innocent until proven by the prosecution. However in the case of Mr Jama he was judged guilty on poor and faulty evidence in 2006.
So now we move to the complex and intricate nature of bail. Bail allows a person charged with an offence to stay within the community given certain conditions. The accused person then must court at a later date. However if the person is not free then they are left to sort out their defence whilst held on remand. After lengthly debate and discussion over many years and recommendations from the NSW Law reform commission a new act was introduced. The Bail Act 2013 (NSW) came into force in May 2013. After the media highlighted two particular cases the NSW government announce a review the following month into the law that had only been in use for less than 1 month.
The end result an amended Bail Act that came into force in January 2015. So after consultation and review the simplified piece of legislation only lasted a month before the government reacted in a 'knee jerk fashion' to public and media pressure.
We now have a two step process in the Bail Act (amendment 2014)
so that people charged with a serious indictable offence must ' show cause' why there continued detention prior to being convicted is not warranted.
Then the bail authority (police or court) can attempt to prove there is an 'unacceptable risk' as to why the suspect should not be free.
Are you confused since the reason for the original change was to make the new Bail Act simple and less complex plus allowing people to be free until trial unless absolutely necessary. Well so is most of the legal community. In fact the NSW Sentencing Council has requested that any future requests for investigations into a new legislation not happen until after 6 months. This is due to the fact that evidence is needed to find out whether laws are not working. Judgement cannot be made purely because a noisy few in the media are criticising a law.
ps see the previous post on the Bail Law changes to see some of the media headlines.
