Tag: gold coast criminal lawyer
  • Criminal Law, Domestic Violence, Family Law

A Call To All Good Men – Stop Domestic Violence

It’s high time for good men to stand up and do something about domestic violence. Last year domestic violence was the leading cause of death and injury in women under 45 in this country. It reportedly accounted for 40 per cent of police time, and cost the economy $13.6 billion. The Easter period alone marked the death of six women and children in a single week. This year, which is not yet two months old, we have already seen 14 Australian women allegedly killed by domestic violence. If that figure runs true, we are online for the shocking statistic of two domestic violence related deaths per week in 2015. That represents a 100% increase in such crimes since last year. It underscores what campaigners have long warned, that domestic violence is at risk of reaching epidemic proportions in Australia.
  • Chris Nyst, International, Opinion

Vive l’humanité

As distressing as last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris proved to be, they were not the first, and certainly not the worst, acts of terrorism the French people have endured in living memory. During the German occupation of France in the early 1940s, Christian soldiers scoured the streets and homes of France arresting, gaoling, and murdering thousands of Jewish citizens. In that terrible time, the French people demonstrated their capacity to endure and overcome racism, terrorism, and inhumanity.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Opinion

Showtime

Talk about art imitating life imitating art imitating life. In the 2002 American action-comedy movie Showtime two odd-couple cops are ordered by the LA Police Department to pair up for a reality television police show. Hard-nosed veteran detective Mitch Preston (played in delightfully irascible fashion by the great Robert De Niro) is a distinctly unenthusiastic participant, but his new partner, brash and charismatic rookie Trey Sellars (Eddie Murphy), laps up the glamour and attention of his 15 minutes of fame, revelling in his new-found celluloid celebrity. Throughout the film the grisly Preston, who just wants to get his serious police work done, bemoans his flashy partner’s corner-cutting and grandstanding for the cameras, ignoring the all-important grunt work in favour of sexy TV stunts.
  • Brendan Nyst, Criminal Law, Human Rights, International, Opinion

Open Justice – Racial Inequality, Video Evidence And Probable Cause

Questions about racial inequality continue to simmer in the United States following last week's decision of a Staten Island Grand Jury not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo to stand trial for the killing of Eric Garner earlier this year. It's a decision which has even some of the country’s most staunchly conservative commentators, such as Fox News traditionalist Bill O’Reilly, scratching their heads in disbelief. Protesters in New York have taken up from where the citizens of Ferguson left off. But unlike the unsavoury shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri, which was shrouded in conflicting versions of events, the video evidence of Garner's death was there for all to see. The deceased's non-threatening behaviour was visible, his cries for help audible, and the excess use of force by the Officers, irrefutable. Upon examining the deceased's body, the coroner labelled Eric Garner's death a homicide, having regard to the fact that he died as a result of a violent attack.  The video clearly shows the officer applying a rear chokehold, a manoeuvre banned by the NYPD in 1993. The evidence was damning.  Or so we thought. On 3 December 2014, a Staten Island Grand Jury declined to indict the officer.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Opinion, Technology

The Underbelly Issue

A couple of years back, at the International Criminal Law Congress, I delivered a paper on the effect of pre-trial publicity on jury trials. Victorian Supreme Court Justice Betty King, who presided over the trial of Melbourne underworld figure Carl Williams and others charged in the wake of the Melbourne gangland war, was on the same panel of speakers. Justice King famously banned the high-rating Underbelly television series from being aired in the state of Victoria during Williams’ trial because of the prejudicial effect it might have on the deliberations the jury. Naturally, the ban caused quite a stir and upset a lot of people, not least of all the producers at Channel 9. But in the end it probably had significantly less effect than Justice King had hoped it would. Despite the television ban, the first episode of Underbelly was available online, everywhere throughout the world wide web, within 20 minutes of it being aired on television in states outside Victoria.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Politics

Ten Years On

10 years ago today, on 27 November 2004, the indigenous community of Palm Island erupted. The islanders had just heard read out at a public meeting the autopsy report into the death of the local man known posthumously simply as Mulrunji. He had been arrested a week earlier and taken to the Palm Island police lock-up, where he died a short while later following a scuffle with a Senior Sergeant of Police. A medical examination found he had sustained a cut above his right eye and four broken ribs, his portal vein was ruptured and his liver was split almost in two.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Human Rights, Opinion

Exactly What They Take

Frank Darabont’s 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption is an enduring classic of American cinema. Based on the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, it tells the story of Andy Dufresne, a young banker sentenced to life imprisonment in the tough Shawshank State Penitentiary for the murder of his wife and her lover, a crime he says he didn’t commit. That’s tough material for any audience, and when the film was first released it all but tanked at the box office. But eventually moviegoers came to embrace the morality tale at the heart of Andy’s redemption, and the film went on to outstanding critical acclaim, recognised as one of the best films of our time. Most of the most quotable quotes come from Andy’s fellow inmate Ellis “Red” Redding, played with understated dignity by the great Morgan Freeman, whose gentle narration becomes a quiet commentary of Dufresne’s desperate struggle to maintain his self-worth in the face of brutality and hopelessness.
  • Chris Nyst, Opinion

Big Things Grow

From little things big things grow. How true it is. I was filled with an enormous sense of pride recently when I drove past one of the giant Griffith University billboards (pictured above) celebrating the success of young Brisbane Barrister Joshua Creamer, a former member of the Nyst team.
  • Chris Nyst, Entertainment, Opinion

So Long Maggie And Dave, And Thanks For All The Fission

I guess just about everybody who's ever had anything much to do with the Australian film industry has a soft spot for television film reviewers Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton. Affectionately referred to by all and sundry simply as Margaret and David, for 28 years the pair agreed, disagreed, and agreed to disagree, about an estimated 8000 films they reviewed, firstly at SBS on The Movie Show and then at the ABC in At The Movies, becoming what filmmaker Greg Maclean has called "a genuinely important part of the cultural landscape of cinema in Australia."
  • Chris Nyst, Human Rights, International, Opinion, Privacy

Carly Nyst Addresses UN Human Rights Council

On Friday last week my dear daughter Carly Nyst, a UK-based Australian lawyer who is currently the Legal Director of the human rights group Privacy International in London, addressed the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on the right to privacy in the digital age. As part of a panel which included Flavia Panasieri , the Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Catalino Botero Marino, Carly told the Commission that the right to privacy is a fundamental part of human dignity, which guarantees the protection of other human rights such as the freedom of expression, and should be jealously defended by the United Nations, particularly in the wake of WikiLeaks and the Edward Snowden Affair. The Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Ms Botero said the Commission recognised that systematic collection of data by governments directly affects the right to privacy and freedom of expression, and appropriate safeguards and controls must be elaborated to prevent those negative effects on human rights.
  • Chris Nyst, Opinion, Sport

Satts Tells It All In Glory

Yesterday I joined South Sydney faithful at the old Redfern Town Hall in Sydney for the launch of Glory, Glory, the autobiographical account of the life and times of South Sydney rugby league legend ‘Gentleman’ John Sattler. MC’ed by John’s premiership-winning son Scott, and introduced by life-long South Sydney tragic Ray Martin, the event was a raging success, not least because of the engaging reminiscences of the great man himself.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Human Rights, Opinion

Need For Restraint

Earlier this week I was sitting in the public gallery of a Magistrates Court on the Sunshine Coast waiting for my client's matter to be called before the magistrate, when a downcast defendant was led into the dock with both hands locked together in a pair of impressive-looking wrist restraints. The police prosecutor proceeded to launch into a dissertation on the defendant's misdemeanours, when the Magistrate abruptly interrupted.