Mary Goes to DPP School

(L) Lady Justice, Photo: cdpp.gov.au (R) Police allegedly research the crime, Photo: Smh.com.au, with the headline: “Parental abduction ring smashed after two-year AFP investigation”

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

As your lawman here on this website, I feel responsible when presenting the law — Oz law, US law, Queensland, Massachusetts, whatever. I usually quote a statute or constitution verbatim. However, I have learned today that I have had a wrong impression of the job of the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions). This probably made my stance wrong in some articles.

The fault lies in my Seppo origins, though that be no excuse. I glibly assumed that Australia’s way of prosecuting serious crime is more or less in parallel with that of America’s way. In the US, a non-federal prosecution can be started by the state (Massachusetts state is called “the Commonwealth of Massachusetts”) often at the District Attorney level. The following is from mass.gov:

“Complaint – A complaint is a document issued by the Court formally charging a person (the defendant) with having committed a crime. The Complaint is usually issued by the Clerk-Magistrate after a police officer or private citizen completes and swears to an ‘Application for Complaint,’ briefly describing the facts of the crime. If the accused person is not already under arrest, the Clerk-Magistrate usually holds a Clerk’s Hearing before deciding whether to issue a complaint. At the hearing, the person complaining and the person accused tell their versions of what took place, and the Clerk decides whether to issue a complaint. If the Clerk does not issue the Complaint, the complaining person may appeal to the judge to issue the Complaint.”

Luckily, now that I think of it, my law articles at GumshoeNews may have been mostly about lawsuits and there the routine is very similar as between US and Australia: a plaintiff makes pleadings, a defendant responds, a court adjudicates.

Investigations

Here is where I got the whole ballgame wrong. I thought the DPP was a sort of FBI (federal bureau of investigation), snooping around, performing arrests, and generally protecting anybody “worth” a couple of billion, from arrest or indictment.

Today, when I inspected the South Australian ODPP (Office of DPP) website, I saw a section headlined “What we don’t do.” It says:

“The ODPP does not investigate crimes.

“Investigating agencies such as South Australia Police and the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption investigate alleged crimes, gather the evidence, and send the evidence to the ODPP to prosecute in court.

“If you have information about a criminal offence, you should report it to South Australia Police.”

Well, so much for that.  I did not even know there was such a thing as The Independent Commission against Corruption.” Wonder what their office hours are. Maybe 2pm to 2.30pm, Tuesdays and Fridays. June only.

I recall Rachel Vaughan saying it was torture to deal with the ombudsman, and as a rule, Ombies won’t usually accept a case until you have run the gamut. Thus, Rachel must have gone through the formalities of making a complaint to The Independent Commission against Corruption. (How that girl does waste ink!)

Oh, there was also a section on the SA website entitled “What we do.” As follows:

“The ODPP prosecutes major indictable offences – these are the more serious offences in South Australia like murder, manslaughter and sexual assault. Trials of major indicatable offences are held in the District or Supreme Court.

“Other offences (known as minor indictable offences and summary offences) are usually prosecuted by specialist police prosecutors or solicitors employed by the South Australian Police. The ODPP sometimes takes over minor indictable or summary offences when they involve particularly sensitive or complex matters.

“The Commonwealth DPP is responsible for prosecuting offences against Commonwealth laws.” [bolding added]

The Deep Problem of an Unaccountable DPP

Seven years ago, in a GumshoeNews article (January 7, 2016), I stumbled over some tricks that the UK uses, in regard to prosecutions. That led me to learn that it was only in the 1980s that Australia brought forth the system of DPP’s. My article had a section called “What Could Justify ‘Prosecutorial Independence’?” I tapped into an ostensibly appropriate source, a paper that Damian Bugg had written. He says he used it for a discussion at Quebec in 2007. [He was then the Commonwealth DPP; had been Tasmania’s DPP back in 1996.]

Here is a quote from my article:

First let me say that Bugg’s paper has no honesty to it. He makes such excuses for an independent DPP as:

• A DPP must be independent of government, so that its choice of whom to prosecute will not be “political.”
• Somebody (in this case the DPP) needs to look at the expense of prosecuting, so that the courts aren’t clogged.
• The old system was confusing in having three bosses: the attorney general, the solicitor general, and the Crown.

When I say Bugg is not being honest I mean these things do not warrant the establishment of an “Independent Prosecutor.” Even Blind Freddie can see that items 2 and 3 could be fixed up by legislation — there is no need whatsoever to bring in a new “authority” for that.

As for Item 1, granted it is a worry if the decision to prosecute Criminal A and not prosecute Criminal B is made in a ‘political way.’ Oh boy is that a problem — as we have seen in the case of Martin Bryant. But how would it help for some other entity, a DPP Office, to choose to prosecute A or B or to refrain from prosecuting A or B?

This is a bad joke. When the prosecutor is under the attorney general, the chain of command comes from the people. They decide who will be in parliament, hence in cabinet, hence in charge of that particular portfolio.

The Huge Role of Police, Both Obvious and Hidden

So, as stated above, no politician, no parliamentarian, wants to be involved in noticing crime and bringing it to the table. A good guess why this came about is that it drops a sort of polite curtain around the many criminal operations that are going on in Australia. Some may even be initiated outside Australia, but heck, who cares — we bow to UK, US, and China on many matters, don’t we?

Now please allow me to recall some crimes we have discussed, for years, at Gumshoe, and try to see where the true responsibility fell — it fell on police, though we did not have good awareness of this.

*1. The behavior of “the Crown’ at youth courts and children’s courts in which (it seems) the competence of a mother to raise her bairns is decided. Criteria for that could be whether she does the dishes on time, whether she displays vaccine hesitancy, and most critically, whether she has ever shown mental derangement by accusing her partner of sexually abusing their child.

Dee McLachlan is, I think, the nation’s repository of info on that (she did not want this role; it was thrust on her). Yet for the first two years of involvement in these cases (2018 and 2019), neither Dee not I understood that the said court is not a court.

I went to my own lawyer in Adelaide for advice and was told that the Youth Court in SA is an arm of the state police. Note: I do not mean the police ae illegitimately involved. No. It’s kosher. Or at least semi-kosher. “Mrs Judge” sitting there in the courtroom is not part of the judiciary.

I truly can’t get it through my thick head. But I wager it explains the amazing lack of legal principle, or justice, or due process, that these non-court courts demonstrate. Some of that is also true of the federal Family Court where, for example “rules of evidence” are officially abandoned.   DEE IS THAT TRUE?

*2. Gumshoe’s prison-related case, about Martin Bryant (regarding whom we produced two plays at the Adelaide Fringe Festival), can now be looked at again in terms of the legitimate — if shocking — power of the state police. I will rattle off a few specific parts of the April 28, 1996 event in which police could control the situation– they could declare what happened and they could then capture their pre-chosen patsy, MB. Bryant.

— Within the hour before the shooting started, at the Port Arthur massacre, local police were conveniently called away to a drug crime scene that was reported by phone and which turned out to be a false alarm. Thus they were not available for policing at the massacre. Indeed even the Hobart cops took hours to turn up, although the ride is less than 90 minutes.

— By evening, when the action had purportedly moved to the Seascape cottage, neighbors with Police-band radios heard a stand-down. When a cop asked for permission to shoot a suspect (who seemed to be shooting at him from a window) he was told “Permission denied; this has to happen.”

— In the morning, when a person (I believe it was police) thew a firebomb of some sort into Seascape cottage, the apparent purpose was to have Bryant burn to death. He staggered out partly burnt, and went to hospital where he was captive for interviews by police and by no one else. There are many more items we know of, but those three will suffice.

*3. Since 2019, we have been screaming the innocence of Dr Russell Pridgeon and his co-defendant Patrick O’Dea (and the unmentionable person, ‘Cling Peaches’). This was a federal police operation, justified (correctly) on the grounds that children get trafficked over state lines. The AFP constructed something called Operation Noetic. Makes you wonder if they had seen a preview of the movie Sound of Freedom — All very dramatic about the good guys (here, AFP cops) rescuing a boy from his grandmother and another two kids from their mother.

What? You don’t understand? Me neither. But to whom is the microphone extended at a press conference, for an explanation of what is going on? If I recall, it was Debbie Platz, a deputy AFP leader, who furnished the gobbledygook. Or should I say it was the controlled press that passed her gobbledygook words on to us. Who furnished photos of the “disgraced doctor” being driven to the watch house? The AFP. Natch.

When O’Dea and Pridgeon arrived at the watchhouse, they awaited arraignment 3 days later at which their bail conditions were set high. Why? Because police — falsely, under oath — made Pridgeon out to be a flight risk. He and O’Dea were alleged to be on their way overseas with some kids. I say the authorities knew this was not so.

(Anybody recall Dun Meng overhearing during the Boston carjacking, that the bad brothers were plotting their next bomb at Times Square? Who says you can’t make this stuff up? Hmm.  Someone does make it up. Quite possibly the very same person that wrote up that script for Boston in 2013, provided the “Operation Noetic” narrative for Australia in 2018!)

The AFP also delivered a complaint to the Medical Council of NSW, causing Pridgeon to be deregistered as a doctor. Was the Medical Council required to act on a complaint rather than a conviction? No, but who doubts a police allegation? The AFP called Russell a KINGPIN of child trafficking. Talk about defamation!

*4. Cath Burn, deputy Police Chief in Sydney during the coronial inquest into deaths at the Lindt Cafe (the Man Haron Monis affair), said that her office does not get involved in Operations. To this day, I don’t know what the statutory basis is for that.

Note: I wrote a book about this case, entitled “Inquest: Siege in Sydney.” I tended to think it was Canberra running the show during Monis’s hostage-holding, though officially this was denied. Come on, someone had to decide whether to shoot Monis, or whatever. Would they leave the outcome of a terrorist incident to the sergeant on duty?

By the way, it is hard to know, at state level, what is in the portfolio of the parliament’s Minister for Police. Dee McLachlan has not got very far when trying to get a peek into that portfolio. The Minister wants you to think it is empty. Note: Ministers for Child Protection also seem to have no connection to the actual body of children’s cases, no matter how tragic these be.

And don’t forget my above quote from South Australia’s ODPP website where it says that for minor offenses, the police bring the case to court. I actually attended a case in Queensland in 2019 where a policeman in uniform was the lawyer for the state. It looked odd to me, but per that SA website, it’s proper. If you didn’t like the way that uniformed prosecutor performed, would you have any recourse to your parliament?

*5. I’ll mention Sandy Hook, but only briefly, as I am not wearing my Murkin hat today. The shooting of 20 children definitely did not take place. Swearda God. But, almost in perfect parallel to the Port Arthur massacre — which did take place and for which no massacrist has ever been charged — the police had full control over evidence.

Consider two Sandy Hook whistle-blowers. One was William Shanley, now deceased — murdered, I say); the other is Wolfgang Halbig, hanging on nicely at age 77.  If you want to look into Shanley’s murder, the US system has at least an avenue of approach — investigation. You can ask your Congressman or state rep to open an investigation on almost any topic. But soon, as usual, the police get in there with their story, their reading of fingerprints, their recruiting of witnesses. Anyway, no one has begun an investigation of Shanley’s death.

As for Wolfgang Halbig, he is outstandingly persistent. The lucky bit is that he himself was a state trooper in Florida. After he balked about Sandy Hook, they came to his home around midnight and arrested him and frog-marched him. The crime was some variant on whistleblowing. Maybe stalking. I forget, it does not matter. The point is that the frog march was OK for a felon but not if Halbig committed only a misdemeanor. He, being an ex-cop, knows the difference. But years have gone by (a decade, last Christmas) and they won’t satisfy him, on paper, that the police did wrong.

Summation

Be careful taking Mary W Maxwell’s word for anything that involves the DPP. She has no sense of what they do, other than her famously warped sense of what they do criminally. (See how DPP’s have dealt with Russell Pridgeon, Martin Bryant, and many others. We’re talking atrocious.)

Speaking of Pridgeon, a magistrate who wronged him, IMHO, Magistrate Anthony Gett, was in the Office of DPP before receiving a judgeship. Note: Maybe this particular revolving door should be proscribed. When you wear the judicial robe, you need to have a mind for both sides in the case.  When a DPP, you definitely are not obliged to work for the accused. Once you decide to prosecute, that is your job. Get ‘im.

Weird, huh?

OK, let’s end with a quiz: In what ways are police involved in the problem of pedophilia and mothers losing their babes? What did Cath Burn of NSW mean when she said we top-brass cops are not supposed to be involved in Operations? Who gave the instruction outside the Seascape cottage “This has to happen”? What did Damian Bugg lie about in his Quebec speech in 2007? Where did Mary Maxwell go wrong?