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Geelong Deanery |
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Mandatory Sentencing - Unjust and RacistRecent media focus on the mandatory sentencing laws of Western Australia and the Northern Territory has been warranted because these laws are unjust and racist. The basic principle of justice is that each be given his or her due. Applied to criminal justice, this principle requires the magistrate or judge determine a sentence that fits the circumstances of the offence. Mandatory sentencing laws are unjust because they prohibit judges and magistrates from considering those circumstances. Moreover, because these laws are known to disproportionately affect the Aboriginal population – some would argue deliberately so – they exacerbate one of the most serious forms of white oppression identified by the 1990 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. These laws are therefore undeniably racist. Mandatory sentencing laws also violate Australia’s obligations in international law. The Federal Government rightly invoked such law when Australia intervened in East Timor. It was also prepared to appeal to that law in opposing safe drug injecting rooms in various States. The evidence reported in the media strongly suggests, however, that the Federal Government went to extraordinary lengths to avoid its international obligations in relation to mandatory sentencing laws in WA and NT. Indeed, the Prime Minister and Cabinet exerted all their power in the Coalition party room to suppress a compromise Private Members Bill that would have avoided invoking the Foreign Affairs power to overturn WA laws, but used the Commonwealth’s direct powers to override the NT laws. Because the rednecked sentiments that spewed forth these laws are widespread in the electorate, the Federal Government bowed to political expediency rather than moral principle. Why worry? Isn’t that what governments always do? We should worry because putting pregnant Aboriginal women in jail for stealing food for themselves and their children is not just a regression to eighteenth-century standards of justice. It also puts Australia’s moral and legal practices on a par with the apartheid practices of the former South Africa and the racist laws of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Australian Christians can no more absolve themselves of the obligation to oppose such immoral laws than could Christians of those countries absolve themselves of the obligation to oppose their governments’ laws. God’s call to Australians to act for justice is loud and clear in these unjust laws of our day. Micheal Leahy |
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