Tag: police
  • Criminal Law, Human Rights, Jonathan Nyst

Is The Best Defence Really A Good Tay-Tay Song?

In this day and age, virtually everyone has high quality audio-visual recording equipment right at their fingertips. Our ever-ready mobile phone can record and disseminate information worldwide with the click of one or two buttons. So it's perhaps no wonder so many get a little bit click-happy nowadays when they find themselves in the presence of the Thin Blue Line.
  • Criminal Law

Predictive Policing

Robot judges in Estonia? American AI sentencing criminals to prison? Computers predicting crimes before they even happen? One may be forgiven for thinking such concepts come straight from a science fiction novel, or the rabid rantings of an online conspiracy theorist. The truth is they are all part of today’s reality. And it looks like it’s only a matter of time before concepts like predictive policing and artificial intelligence will be an everyday feature of justice systems worldwide. 
  • Criminal Law

Deputy Dog

With the festival season back in full swing, plenty of music lovers are sure to find themselves once more confronted by the canine constabulary. The infamous Police Drug Detection Dog has become such an integral part of the law-enforcement landscape that nowadays no festival frolic is complete without a good going over by some deputy dog. We’re told it’s all a necessary part of policing’s zero-tolerance towards drugs, but lately some commentators have raised serious questions about the efficacy and effectiveness of such undignified intrusion, and whether the deployment of sniffer dogs to allow police to farm out reasonable suspicion to their four-legged friends, can ultimately be justified.
  • Chris Nyst, Commissions of Inquiry, Criminal Law, Politics

More Robust Times

For many the recent retrospective by Brisbane’s Courier Mail newspaper, celebrating the 30 year anniversary of the game-changing Fitzgerald Commission of Inquiry into Police Corruption in Queensland, will have brought back memories of more robust times. Between 1987 and 1989 the inquiry, presided over by Tony Fitzgerald, then a razor-sharp and highly regarded Brisbane barrister, systematically uncovered and dismantled an entrenched culture of police corruption that led all the way to the top.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Human Rights

A Matter Of Restraint

Today’s news out of the Broncos Rugby League headquarters about an alleged “drunken incident” involving star centre James Roberts has let more than a few old spectres out of the closet. Newspapers today reported that an allegation Roberts verbally abused a barmaid in a drunken rage at the Normanby Hotel has been referred to the NRL’s integrity unit, which reportedly imposed a 12 month alcohol ban on Roberts in 2014 following his sacking at Penrith.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law

Can Police Just Randomly Stop and Search Me?

At festivals like Splendour in the Grass and Greazefest, music lovers have become accustomed to seeing police routinely searching people suspected of having drugs in their possession. In certain circumstances police are entitled to do that, but it’s not just open season. Police are not entitled to just randomly stop and search people for no good reason. Unless a police officer has an actual search warrant, then they’re not entitled to detain and search a person except where they suspect on reasonable grounds that person has drugs in their possession.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law

For The Record…

Last week the press had a field day taking pot-shots at Southport magistrate Bernadette Callaghan for ordering police to remove handcuffs from a defendant appearing in court. When the man subsequently made a run for it, according to newspaper reports police went into a spin, with one ‘police source’ accusing the magistrate of treating herself as being “above the law” because she refused to have the defendant manacled in her courtroom, and another high-ranking officer threatening to boycott the courts over the matter.
  • 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

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.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, International

When Are Young Cops Going To Be Taught Choker Holds Are Lethal?

About 20 years ago I acted for a young police officer who was charged with assault occasioning grievous bodily harm after he applied a particularly vigorous choker hold in arresting a recalcitrant drink driver. Following his police training to the letter, my client locked his arm around the man's neck and pulled it tight enough to restrict the offender’s blood flow to his brain, causing temporary loss of consciousness, a very effective way of incapacitating anybody. Unfortunately, he also managed to pop one of the man's eyes out of its socket, and cause further unintended but significant damage.