Pedo protest for ‘justice’

themercury.com.au

Court Reporter

AN online victims advocate frustrated by what he says are lenient sentences for child sex and child porn offenders will stage a protest outside the Burnie Supreme Court on Monday.

The anonymous man, who runs the popular Tasmanian Facebook page And Justice for All, said the protest would be

SUBSCRIPTIONS 1300 696 397 staged ahead of sentencing for a man who had confessed to child porn charges.

He said it wasn’t good enough that offenders were punished with community correction orders and home detention, instead of jail.

“The bar needs to be re-set for all sex crimes,” the man told the Mercury

He said he didn’t necessarily support mandatory minimum sentences, believing it would lead to more offenders pleading not guilty, but said punishment should be evidence-based and harsher for those who offended against children.

His comments came in the wake of Tasmanian child porn offender Damir Huskic’s sentencing earlier this month.

The 28-year-old former supermarket employee, who was found with 14 child porn videos on his computer, avoided jail time and was instead given a 12-month community correction order with 70 hours of unpaid community service.

The man also mentioned a Launceston sentence handed down by the Supreme Court of Tasmania this week, in which a man molested his stepdaughter for four years, and was jailed for the crime of “maintaining a sexual relationship with a young person”, which he described as a “joke”.

Earlier this week a trial found repeat paedophile sex offender and former Hobart teacher Darrel George Harington guilty of more sex crimes against two students.

During the trial, Justice Michael Brett noted the name of the crime had often been acknowledged as a “very poor name for this particular crime”.

“Really, the crime is not concerned with the fact of a relationship — it has nothing do with a relationship.

“What this crime is concerned with is that during a specified period, a person committed three or more sexual crimes … the law says they’re effectively bungled together,” he told the jury before it entered into deliberations on Tuesday.

The Burnie protest will be held outside the Supreme Court between 10am and 1pm.