Thursday, January 12, 2017



This is just wrong

Today's "justice" horror story: Someone who has been effectively imprisoned for more than a decade for a trivial offence:

He's been locked up for more than 10 years.

His crime? Breaking the windows of his neighbour's van after reacting to a loud noise.

The severely autistic and intellectually disabled man, who has name suppression, has been detained in various intellectual disability secure care facilities since 2006.

[...]

He was found on the balance of probabilities to have committed the offence, but deemed unfit to stand trial.


The crimes he was charged with - wilful damage and being unlawfully in an enclosed yard - have maximum penalties of three months imprisonment. Even if he had been given the maximum sentence - unlikely - and been sentenced to serve his time sequentially rather than concurrently - even more unlikely - this man has still been imprisoned for twenty times longer than the maximum possible sentence. And purely because he is intellectually disabled.

This is wrong, it is discriminatory, and it is unjust. This man should be released immediately, and compensated for the decade of life the state has stolen from him.