Updated
The sentencing records of Victorian judges and magistrates would be published online, to allow the public to better “scrutinise” Victoria’s judiciary, if the Opposition is elected on Saturday.
Under the policy, internet users would be able to access a judge or magistrate’s sentencing decisions, rate of decisions overturned on appeal, and the time taken by judges and magistrates to deliver decisions.
Quarterly “performance data” for individual courts would also be published.
The move would allow the public to compare the sentencing records of Victorian judges against one another and against their interstate counterparts, shadow attorney-general John Pesutto said.
“It will ensure that the public is able to scrutinise the performance of courts more closely and more easily,” Mr Pesutto said.
“But it will also give the courts a really good opportunity to communicate to the public things like context and other matters.
“We’ve all seen in the last year or two some very high-profile decisions where sentences are being handed down and the community has greeted that with outrage because it just hasn’t reflected the depth of feeling about the particular crime concerned that the community feels.”
Lawyer warns against ’empty sandwich’
Criminal lawyer Rob Melasecca said court reporting by the media played a much more important role in shaping the public’s understanding of sentencing.
“I don’t think data is going to help anybody, it’s too vacuumous, it’s not going to lead to any conclusions,” said Mr Melasecca, who chairs the Victorian Custody Reference Group.
“I think what is important is to understand the decisions that are made and why they’re made and that would require a much more realistic appraisal of the decisions and better reporting.”
Mr Melasecca said he disagreed with the Opposition’s claim that some recent judicial decisions had been at odds with the Victorian community’s expectations.
“I’m aware of the decisions that [Mr Pesutto] is referring to, and the reason that they didn’t match the community expectations is that the community wasn’t given the full details of the reasons for the sentence,” he said.
“When they’re just given the offence committed and the result, with no justification in the middle, it’s just an empty sandwich in the end.”
Mr Melasecca said the jail system was under pressure because of a “knee-jerk reaction by a lynch-mob mentality”.
“We are creating situations where people are being sent to jail who ought not be sent to jail,” he said.
“We have a real, real custody problem at the moment.”
Topics: law-crime-and-justice, judges-and-legal-profession, crime, state-elections, courts-and-trials, melbourne-3000, vic
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