Tag: Queensland Police
  • 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, Human Rights, Opinion, Politics

Fixated Folk

This week I learned something kind of crazy that I never knew before.A gentleman came to my office complaining that five police officers had recently materialised at his front door, without warning or invitation, wanting to conduct a psychiatric assessment on him. It all sounded more than a little bit bizarre to me but, since the gentleman appeared otherwise quite lucid, I tried to dig a little deeper, in the hope of understanding what it may be all about. He didn't really know. The best he could tell me was the officers concerned were apparently attached to something called the Fixated Persons Unit. 
  • 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.