Killers laugh during court appearances

BECAUSE different rules apply when reporting on children accused of crime there is always a different atmosphere in the court when a defendant 17 years or younger is brought into the dock.

The Children’s Court is closed to the public with only court staff, legal representatives, close family of the defendant and accredited journalists reporting on the case permitted in the courtroom.

When an adult charged with murder is brought into the dock, the court is usually packed with those involved as well as the public because the court is open, often packed and is buzzing with whispers.

That is not the case with Children’s Court which is quieter and deliberately less confronting for the defendant child.

However, that didn’t seem to matter with certain children charged with murder brought into Toowoomba’s courts.

I well recall teenage killers Scott Geoffrey Maygar and John Brian Woodman being brought into the dock after being charged with what was arguably Toowoomba’s most heinous murders – the city’s infamous “Triple Murder” of Michael Thompson, Tyson Wilson and David Lyons.

Maygar and Woodman showed no remorse whatsoever and whispered and joked with each other when they were first dragged into court upon their arrest and at their pre-trial committal hearing which they turned into a circus.

With the families of their victims in court watching on, the pair had laughed and motioned to each other and to a series of their gang mates brought up from various prisons to give evidence at their hearing.

Fortunately, those two teen psychopaths were the worst of the list of teenagers I’ve seen appear in Toowoomba’s courts on murder.

Mostly, in my experience, child killers tend to stand quietly and emotionless and let their lawyers do their talking.

In the adult courts, convicted killers tend to spend more time conversing with their lawyers and nodding or waving to family and friends in the public gallery.

Sentencing of juvenile killers always has a much sadder feel to it because there is a certain shock effect that someone so young standing in the dock before you has deliberately taken the life of another human being.