FEDERAL COURT BACKS NON-JAIL SENTENCES FOR DRUGS CRIMES

An emphasis on rehabilitation rather than punishment of drug offenders is
likely to continue in Canberra's court as a result of a Full Federal Court
ruling yesterday.

Justices Jeffrey Miles, Rodney Madgwick and John Dowsett unanimously
dismissed a Crown appeal against the leniency shown by the ACT Supreme
Court to a drug-addicted armed robber, Jamie Griggs, 25, who spent just
over seven months in custody before being released to attend a
drug-rehabilitation program.

He pleaded guilty of threatening the receptionist at a Canberra motel with
a blood-filled syringe, punching her and stealing $50. Griggs had been
detoxifying at the time, staying in the motel in a room paid for by a
charitable organisation.

His attack on the receptionist was found to [be] unpremeditated and based
on a reasonable but mistaken belief that he had been entitled to a refund
from the motel.

The Full Federal Court could find no error in Justice Terence Higgins's
approach to dealing with Griggs, and dismissed the Crown's appeal. The
court emphasised that upholding a Crown appeal would only ever occur in
exceptional circumstances.

Justice Miles said the sentencing policies of the past had failed to curb
the use of heroin. Its use was now so prevalent in the ACT that the
Government supported needle distribution programs and 'peer- managed'
schemes to keep users as healthy as possible.

'The community no longer demands that heroin users be punished as such, and
there is an emerging, if not predominant, community attitude that the
socially adverse effects of heroin use are best met by a response in the
public health system rather than by mere punishment in the criminal justice
system,' he said.

It was no longer the case that the use of mind-altering drugs could not
possibly be accepted as a mitigating factor in the commission of crime.

Justice Miles said it was in the context of changing attitudes that the
ACT's Drugs of Dependence Act had become law, providing for drug- addicted
offenders to undergo treatment, an option not to be lightly dismissed. It
was true, as the court pointed out recently, that understandable compassion
for addicts must not be allowed to cloud the court's judgment of the
seriousness of drug-motivated crime. But judgment would also be clouded if
courts did not recognise that most serious crime was now drug-related and
often explicable by drug dependence.

'It should be recognised that crime in the ACT at the present time is
overwhelmingly drug-related, and related mainly to heroin, a drug which is
in widespread use in the community . . .' Justice Miles said.

ACT judges and magistrates should continue to be free, in appropriate
circumstances, to release offenders on bonds while undertaking some form of
rehabilitation, he said.