Category: Appeals

Being prosecuted for a criminal or traffic offence can be a nerve-wracking experience. You may be unfamiliar with the process, unsure of the best way forward and concerned about the outcome. But whether you are charged with a less-serious matter such as drug possession, drink driving or common assault, or accused of something as serious ...

We’ve reported on a number of police officers who’ve engaged in crime, corruption and other forms of misconduct, yet still been allowed to remain on the NSW Police Force. There are currently hundreds of officers on the NSW force with criminal convictions against their names, and others who are allowed to keep their badges despite ...

Parole is the release of an inmate(the parolee) into the community after the expiry of their ‘non-parole period’ (the minimum term they must spend in prison) and before the expiry of their full term of imprisonment. So, for example, an inmate who is given a non-parole period of 7 years and a full term of ...

67-year-old former ‘Hey Dad’ star, Robert Hughes, was convicted in Downing Centre District Court of child sex offences in May 2014. He was sentenced to a full term of 10 years and 6 months in prison, with a ‘non parole period’ of 6 years – which means he must spend at least 6 years behind ...

Imagine this: you are a 15-year-old boy brought into the police station for questioning about a stabbing murder which occurred during a fight between two groups of young males. Due to your age, you are given a ‘support person’ who later tells police you confessed to the killing. You deny ever saying such a thing ...

Mrs Nguyen Thi Huong looked anguished as the court in Ho Chi Minh City read its verdict recently. The 73-year-old Vietnamese-Australian woman has been sentenced to death for heroin trafficking. It sounds implausible … incongruous, but Vietnamese community leaders in Australia say it is not uncommon: traffickers targeting elderly female mules in the belief they ...

Legal experts have called for the establishment of a new national body to investigate possible wrongful convictions, which would work in a similar way to the review body in the UK. Flinders University law lecturer Bibi Sangha believes such a body is desperately needed to examine convictions based upon dubious evidence. Questionable forensic evidence resulted ...

The Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission is investigating allegations that a woman was brutalised at the hands of two police officers at Ballarat Police Station. The proceedings are being streamed live into a well-known Ballarat restaurant this week, to enable the public to see ‘justice being done’. The public screening has outraged the Police Association, which ...

A man has attempted to have his conviction overturned because his criminal defence lawyer did not reduce the victim to tears during cross-examination. Francis Kofi Okrah was sentenced to seven years in prison after being found guilty of sexual assault in Manchester Crown Court two years ago. The Court was told that Mr Okrah approached ...

Coming back to your car to find a parking ticket tucked under the windscreen is frustrating, but thanks to a 19-year-old university student from the UK, appealing parking fines may soon be a whole lot easier – and cheaper. Joshua Browder, a student at Stanford University in London, has devised a clever ‘robot lawyer’ to ...