Tag: Criminal Code
  • Alex Somers, Criminal Law

Malice Aforethought

Last week, a Queensland mother became the first person to be charged under the State’s new, expanded definition of murder laws, after allegedly leaving her two infant children to die in the blistering heat of her car, after falling asleep one Saturday afternoon.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law

In Defence Of The Defence

This week the Queensland opposition launched a robust attack on a centuries-old criminal law defence. The 'mistake of fact’ defence was encoded into Queensland law in 1899 when our Criminal Code was first enacted, adopting a common-law notion dating back at least as far as pre-Norman England, that criminal liability requires some sort of actual subjective culpability, whether based on moral guilt or negligence. Section 24 of our Code provides that a person who does something under an honest and reasonable, but mistaken, belief as to a particular fact, they are not criminally responsible to any greater extent than if that belief was correct.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law

Hard Cases

Lawyers have this thing they sometimes like to say. “Hard cases make bad law.” It’s true. About thirty years ago I got the job to represent a nice, sweet, softly-spoken lady who stabbed her husband 87 times with a serrated kitchen knife. Not surprisingly he ended up dead as a doornail.
  • Criminal Law, International

On The Edge

I was contemplating suicide this week. Not personally contemplating the actual deed mind you - in fact, it may be more accurate to say that suicide was contemplating me. You see, our apartment windows face the ocean and the twice-yearly clean by the burly-blokes-with-beards-and-rope is insufficient for my taste in crystal clear views. So it was that I found myself accidentally stuck on a 2 foot wide ledge with no railing, 23 floors high, in a pair of jeans, with no shirt and no phone … and carrying a squeegee mop. A moment before, I had pushed the window that inch too far and, as the lock clicked on the inside with me on the outside, I cursed loudly and creatively. Knowing that my girlfriend was out for at least the next hour, I braced myself hard against the window and settled in for some quiet contemplation.