Debasing the criminal justice system to fight fire with fire
Victorian Gangland affair exposes a whatever-it-takes mentality,
LAST
week the High Court finally lifted the lid officially on the fact that Victoria Police, in its endsjustifies-the-means approach to closing down Melbourne’s notorious Gangland decade of serious criminal activity and executions, had used a criminal lawyer as an informer. Transparency finally won out over suppression of publication.
The High Court decision reveals that an experienced Victorian barrister who acted for Gangland criminals such as Tony Mokbel, now serving a lengthy sentence for drug trafficking and fleeing Australia to Greece, agreed in 2003 to be a police informer, and that from 2005 was part of the informer program of Victoria Police. The barrister was wired up while talking to clients and it is now estimated she provided material for a few thousand police files.
In 2017 Victoria Police and the informer went to the Victorian Supreme Court to prevent that state’s DPP from sharing some of the information with those convicted courtesy of the informer’s assistance.
There is, by the way, a Tasmanian link to this informer scheme.
Simon Overland, then a senior Victoria Police officer, headed the Purana Taskforce which was chasing Gangland types such as Mokbel and now deceased gangland boss Carl Williams.
Mr Overland was secretary of the Department of Justice in Tasmania from 2011 until last year. The Herald Sun reported last Thursday that Mr Overland was a proponent of this scheme.
Mr Overland will no doubt have the chance to explain his role to the Royal Commission that the Andrews government has appointed to examine this extraordinary affair.
The High Court is rightly aghast at what has happened in Victoria. It described the barrister, now known as Lawyer X, “actions in purporting to act as counsel for the Convicted Persons while covertly informing against them were fundamental and appalling breaches of [her] obligations as counsel to her clients and of [her] duties to the court. “
But the Court excoriated Victoria Police. That organisation the High Court said “were guilty of reprehensible conduct in knowingly encouraging [the informer] to do as she did and were involved in sanctioning atrocious breaches of the sworn duty of every police officer to discharge all duties imposed on them faithfully and according to law without favour or affection, malice or ill-will. As a result”, the Court said, “the prosecution of each Convicted Person was corrupted in a manner which debased fundamental premises of the criminal justice system.”
Despite engaging in what amounts to the most corrupt assault on the justice system in Victoria’s history, some police simply shrug their shoulders and say they would do it again. One officer told the media, “They say it wasn’t cricket.
Too bad, we were dealing with an underworld war. People were dying and we were never going to turn our backs on an intelligence source no matter who they were.” This is a frightening mindset for a police officer in a democracy.
Do not think for a moment that Tasmania Police is immune from serious wrongdoing as a consequence of a whatever-it-takes attitude to criminal investigations. It, and we as a community, must be vigilant against such a culture.
One of the reasons what happened in Victoria occurred was because we live in a society which uncritically supports police and which gives in to their incessant quest for less scrutiny and more powers.
In Tasmania police ran a campaign earlier this year, aided by political and friends, to accumulate more power and reintroduce consorting laws.
The law and order rhetoric in Australia, imported from Ronald Reagan’s 1980s America, has resulted in a major expansion of police powers, and culture which says ‘criminals’ don’t have rights.
Remember the last time a politician in Victoria or across Australia said no to police power grabs? Or when was it that our politicians criticised police for abuses of power? The answer to both questions is that such incidents are rare if they exist at all.
But the critic will say that what Victoria Police got up to in the Gangland cases did not require legislation sponsored by politicians. The decision by senior Victorian police to use the barrister informer as a means of getting a grip on the Gangland landscape was not a criminal act.
To focus the issue this way is to miss the point. The real matter at hand is that we must remember police will and do push boundaries and act unethically when it comes to securing ‘victories’ over supposedly sophisticated criminal activity.
That is why there are police today who think there was nothing untoward in debasing the criminal justice system in Victoria because they had to fight fire with fire.