1,720,980 research outputs found
The Maliciousness of Rape
No full textThe High Court of Australia’s judgment in Mraz v The Queen (No 1)1 was the first time the court
offered a legal opinion on rape. But those opinions have long been forgotten as the case instead
became precedential for its decisions on miscarriages of justice in Mraz (No 1) and estoppel in Mraz
v The Queen (No 2).2 These precedents, favourable to the accused, meant no justice for the deceased
woman. The legal use of Mraz has obscured the original issue underlying the appeals at the time: what
was the “maliciousness” of rape and what “injury” did it cause?Arts, Education & Law Group, School of Criminology and Criminal JusticeFull Tex
'Until Death Does Part Us': Male Friendship, Intimacy and Violence in Late Colonial Melbourne
No full textArts, Education & Law Group, School of Criminology and Criminal JusticeNo Full Tex
The 'Condemned Criminals': sexual violence, race, and manliness in colonial Australia
No full textIn 1879, the New South Wales government took the unusual step of recommending the execution of three men-two white and one black-for two separate crimes of rape. The government's decision provoked outcry from capital punishment abolitionists who inundated the parliament and press with appeals for mercy, and held sensational public rallies decrying the use of the death penalty. Politicians' varied responses to the crimes show their preoccupations in ensuring ideals of colonial manliness and colonial honour remained intact no matter what the cost. This case offers an important example of the complex relationship between gender, race, sexuality and colonial politics.Arts, Education & Law Group, School of Criminology and Criminal JusticeNo Full Tex
The Dark Side of the Family: Paternal Child Homicide in Australia
No full textFeminist scholars have produced an extensive literature on the social, economic, psychological, and criminological aspects of female infanticide. By contrast, there have been few historical studies of fathers who have murdered their children. This article analyses the problem of paternal filicide in three ways. First, it contextualises state responses to child homicide in relation to the government's wider treatment of violence in the home. Second, it analyses men's stated motivations for child murder, highlighting the significance of their conceptions of fatherhood and family to their violent actions. And finally, it interrogates onlookers' understandings of male violence, showing that the family was central to the boundaries onlookers drew between understandable and incomprehensible violence. Overall, the article shows that fathers' violent acts stemmed from significantly different social pressures to maternal child killing. The various interpretations of male violence tell us much about historical understandings of fathers' responsibilities, men's family roles, and the place of violence in the home.Arts, Education & Law Group, School of Criminology and Criminal JusticeNo Full Tex
Gender, Victimisation and Prosecutorial Discretion in the Attrition of Sexual Offences
No full textThis study is the first systematic historical examination of
abandonment of sexual offence cases in common law
jurisdictions. Examining the records of hundreds of
discontinued prosecutions from the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries reveals patterns in these
discontinuations. At the macro level, abandonment in
sexual offence cases differed from that for other violent
crime, with discontinuation related to case characteristics
such as the age and sex of the complainant; young women
were the most affected by discontinuations. At the
individual case level, focusing primarily on issuing of nolle
prosequi shows that the reasons prosecutors gave for
abandonment most often referred to a lack of evidence.
Although the theoretical concept of discontinuing a
prosecution was based in discretionary, individualised
decision making, in practice it appears that decisions to
prosecute had structural bases in gendered and legal
biases that were often conflated under the umbrella of
complainant 'credibility'. These findings are similar to
those in contemporary studies of attrition and
prosecutorial discretion, indicating the longevity of these
issues in the prosecution of sexual offences. They
additionally highlight a new dimension, in showing the
prevalence of judicial direction and intervention in
prosecutors' decisions to issue a nolle prosequi
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The Rise of the Guilty Plea in Australian Supreme Courts: A History
No full textThe contemporary Australian criminal prosecution process functions as a guilty plea system. The guilty plea is critical to the efficient running of criminal courts and the criminal justice system. Statutory provisions and case law almost guarantee that defendants prosecuted for serious criminal offences receive sentence reductions in exchange for guilty pleas. Whilst guilty pleas are arguably the most important mitigating factor that contemporary judges consider in their sentencing deliberations, this was not always the case. Historically, most defendants pleaded ‘not guilty’ and jury trials were the dominant mode of case disposition. Yet defendants began pleading guilty in increasingly greater proportions in some US and English courts from around the mid-nineteenth century. The ‘rise of the guilty plea’ triggered system transformation from jury trial to a guilty plea system of prosecution.
This thesis is the first research to examine the rise of the guilty plea in the Australian context. It departs from previous scholarship by arguing a theoretical framework that positions the ‘guilty plea’ rather than ‘plea bargaining’ as the focus of study. The historical plea bargaining scholarship hypothesises that the guilty plea phenomenon was the outcome of emerging plea bargaining practices between prosecuting and defence counsel. However the precursors to bargaining, including public prosecution and centralised policing, were extant in the Australian criminal justice system long before guilty pleas began accelerating. This thesis argues that a plea bargaining framework is unsuited to explaining system transformation in Australian courts.
This thesis employs a mixed methods research methodology to investigate guilty pleas at both a macro and micro-level of analysis. The quantitative study employs large scale data from the Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship project, ‘The Prosecution Project’. It tracks the acceleration of defendants’ guilty pleas in more than 10,000 cases prosecuted in the Queensland, Western Australian and Victorian Supreme Courts between 1901 and 1961. It identifies the mid-twentieth century as the period when system transformation occurred in Australian courts, significantly later than hypothesised in the current scholarship. The significant mechanism driving this acceleration was the rapid increase in guilty pleas to property theft prosecutions, specifically burglary and stealing.
The qualitative component of the study provides micro-level, in-depth analysis of the practices of police, lawyers, and the judiciary that influenced defendants’ guilty pleas. The analysis focuses on 60 property theft cases prosecuted in the Queensland Supreme Court, but also synthesises a range of archival sources including reported decisions, administrative records, and newspapers. This analysis identifies the key role of police practices in the pre-trial stage of the prosecution process. These practices focused on convictions obtained through confessional material, rather than investigation, but increasingly included problematic practices such as inducing confessions and guilty pleas. However, crown prosecutors and the judiciary failed to acknowledge the extent of these practices until the transformation to a guilty plea system was complete. Police practices were thus the central cog in a series of linked gears of practice involving lawyers and the judiciary that influenced defendants’ decisions to plead guilty and established the origins of the contemporary guilty plea system.Thesis (PhD Doctorate)Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)School of Crim & Crim JusticeArts, Education and LawFull Tex
War Zones to New Homes: Displacement, Encampment, and Resettlement in Post-War Queensland
No full textThe mass displacement of refugees that occurred following the Second World War was the largest refugee crisis the world had ever experienced. The resettlement of these Displaced Persons (DPs) and families was a complex process for those who sought lives removed from the trauma of wartime Europe. Australian involvement in the Displaced Persons Resettlement Scheme included the resettlement of numerous individuals and families across the country. Yet, the density of settlement varied greatly between states, and Queensland’s post-war migrant and refugee intake was the lowest of the nation. The resettlement conditions for Displaced Persons in Queensland reflected a stark contrast to resettlement experiences in other Australian locations. Employment of Displaced Persons in Queensland was frequently structured around seasonal work projects, and was not sustained by industry in the same manner as many interstate locations such as Sydney and Melbourne. The lack of dedicated Reception and Training Centres for migrants and Displaced Persons in Queensland substantially altered the training and facilities available to refugees during their initial accommodation in the State, and many families became separated as a result of accommodation and work requirements. As the resettlement of Displaced Persons continued across Queensland’s numerous regions, many families also found themselves in areas of relatively low cultural diversity. No comprehensive study has previously been conducted to analyse the resettlement of Displaced Persons and their children in Queensland. This project makes combined use of more than 10 000 archival files and newly collected oral history interviews with more than 50 Displaced Persons in order to understand the resettlement experiences of refugees in regions of low cultural and linguistic diversity. Focussing directly on the experiences of Polish, Latvian and Ukrainian families, this is the first work that systematically and exclusively assesses the resettlement of Displaced Persons in Queensland. This project contributes new knowledge to the study of displacement and refugee experiences of resettlement. In particular, it provides new insight into the resettlement of refugees in regions of low cultural and linguistic diversity, and the way in which resettlement is influenced by prior experiences of displacement and encampment. This thesis considers the displacement, encampment and resettlement of Polish, Latvian and Ukrainian Displaced Persons with children who were resettled in Queensland between 1947 and 1959. Considering the resettlement of Poles, Latvians and Ukrainians creates insight into the experiences of refugees who have been displaced having previously undergone sequential and compounded experiences of oppression and violence over decades. Drawing on the consequences of this, the thesis also considers Displaced Persons who were unable to identify with their nationality or citizenship of birth due to multiple territory and border changes. The personal and social impact of this was accentuated by their resettlement in areas lacking established migrant communities. Without such communities, locals had no capacity to understand or recognise refugees’ compounded and enduring loss. This project brings to light the ways in which displacement and encampment form legacies that continue to resonate across decades of resettlement. Such experiences not only became an historical trauma in their own right, but became a lens through which refugees came to understand their subsequent experiences in Queensland. These events were understood differently through their refraction via the lens of familial and social networks that developed in Queensland. This knowledge has contemporary implications for understanding the likely impact of the long-term encampment and incarceration of refugees globally. It also offers ways to consider the resettlement of refugees in Australia and other locations that may not have established migrant communities and support networks.Thesis (PhD Doctorate)Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)School of Hum, Lang & Soc ScArts, Education and LawFull Tex
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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