Coalition acts to protect community against softer sentences

The Liberal Party and the Nationals have forced the Brumby Government to
accept a sunset clause for new laws that introduce the risk of courts
offering lower sentences to offenders to encourage them to plead guilty, so
as to reduce court backlogs.

The government’s own expert advisory body, the Sentencing Advisory Council,
recommended that these new “indicative sentence” laws be trialled only as a
pilot scheme in the County Court.

However, the Brumby government attempted to introduce the laws on a
permanent basis in both the Supreme and County Courts as part of its
Criminal Procedure Legislation Amendment Bill, with no adequate explanation
as to why it was departing from its own experts’ recommendation.

The laws are intended to give offenders who might be considering pleading
guilty the opportunity to apply to the court to find out in advance the
sort of sentence they would receive if they did plead guilty.

While these laws have the potential to help victims and the community by
avoiding the trauma and cost of protracted trials, they also run the risk
that courts will feel under pressure to offer more lenient sentences, in
order to help overcome the huge court backlogs that have built up under the
Bracks and Brumby governments.

After the Liberal Party and the Nationals gave the government copies of
proposed amendments to apply a two-year sunset clause to the changes, the
government introduced its own amendments. These amendments have now been
passed.

As a result, the indicative sentence laws for the Supreme and County Courts
will operate as a genuine pilot scheme that expires on 30 June 2010.
Further legislation will need to be passed if the government wants to
extend the laws beyond that date.

“This is a win for the community because we can see if these laws will work
well to avoid unnecessary trials, while protecting Victorians against the
Brumby Government using lower sentences as a backdoor way of reducing court
waiting lists,” Shadow Attorney General Robert Clark said.

The Productivity Commission’s Report on Government Services 2008 shows that
Victoria’s courts have some of the biggest criminal case backlogs in
Australia, with 1094 appeal cases on the County Court waiting lists as at
30 June last year, up from 510 cases in 2003, and 2,467 non-appeal cases,
up from 1,722.