Queensland Opposition Planning to Follow ‘Mindless Mandatory Sentencing Track'
The Queensland Council for Civil Liberties (QCCL) today accused the Queensland Opposition of planning to go down the same mindless mandatory sentencing track as the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
QCCL Vice-President Terry O'Gorman said figures released yesterday which supposedly show almost one in three drug dealers escaped jail terms last year were open to any spin which any politician wanted to put on them.
"The fact is the Attorney-General has extremely wide powers to go to the Court of Appeal and seek to have perceived lenient sentences increased", Mr O'Gorman said.
Mr O'Gorman said that this is a power which is very frequently exercised by both current Attorney-General Matt Foley and his Coalition predecessor, Denver Beanland.
CJC figures on rates of imprisonment show that the Queensland jail population has skyrocketed over the last six years so that the State is currently spending record sums on building new prisons.
"When it is considered that drug dealing is defined in the Drugs Misuse Act as even covering a situation of one person discussing supplying a marijuana joint to another without profit, it is not surprising that some convicted under this very wide definition are not jailed, Mr O'Gorman said.
Mr O'Gorman said the Coalition should learn from its previous discredited forays into mandatory sentencing.
In the 1970's, the justice system started jailing elderly people when mandatory sentencing was introduced for disqualified driving. Magistrates bemoaned the injustices they were forced to engage in by sending offenders to jail when the facts of individual cases indicated that they should not be jailed.
"And in a major law and order election offensive in the 1980's, Queensland passed the Drugs Misuse Act in 1986 which provided for mandatory life imprisonment for anyone convicted of drug trafficking", Mr O'Gorman said.
Mr O'Gorman said that pathetic addict dealers who sold small amounts of heroin to feed a debilitating drug dependence were jailed for life sentences which had to be redetermined into fixed sentences when the folly of such a mandatory sentencing regime started to unravel.
Mr O'Gorman called on the Opposition to drop plans for mandatory minimum sentences.