I want to start by saying that this is unlike anything that
I normally write. Perhaps because it’s
unlike anything I or any of us normally have to deal with. Normally my writing deals with issues such as
lifestyle, sport and entertainment.
Topics that allow me to take a light-hearted look at day-to-day topics
and in the process, hopefully make people reading my work have a laugh.
Today is a little different.
It seems more than a little ironic that today, the
International Day of Happiness, a day designed to celebrate the creation of
happiness in the world around us, would instead be a day marred by grief, anger
and fear.
Late Tuesday night, 17 year-old Masa Vukotic was stabbed to
death while walking in a Doncaster park.
It occurred just 500m from her home.
Where do we go from here?
For starters, let’s stop using the word ‘occurred’. ‘Occurred’ is a word we use to describe a
freak event. Something that happens
without warning. Something, which is
often unpreventable. This was certainly not
the case in this instance. The alleged attacker
(and I use the word ‘alleged’ in its loosest sense) in fact turned himself in
to police.
This isn’t just a country in grief over the murder of an
innocent teenage girl. It’s a nation
disgusted, furious and betrayed by a justice system, which is supposed to
protect it. Instead, for the third time
in less than as many years, the country has been rocked by a heinous crime
being perpetrated by a repeat-offender.
First there was Adrian Ernest Bayley’s rape and murder of
Jill Meagher. Bayley's history of
violent attacks on women spans more than two decades. The Victorian Parole Board failed to cancel
his parole after a violent assault and a judge's warning that the public needed
to be protected from him. When he was
19, he raped two teenagers in separate attacks.
He served just 22 months of a five-year sentence for sexual
assault, later admitting he faked his way through a sex offenders' program to
get early release. In September 2000, he
began what Judge Tony Duckett described as “a horrendous wave of crimes against
St Kilda sex workers, raping five prostitutes over a six-month period.”
Then there was the case of Martin Place gunman, Man Monis. Convicted of stalking his ex-partner, in December 2013 he was
charged with being an accessory to her murder. He was granted bail.
According to a joint report by the federal and
NSW governments released last month, “four months later, he was charged
with sexual assault offences committed as a spiritual healer and was again
released on bail.”
Now
this. An innocent young woman killed in
a park, allegedly by Sean Price. A man
who, in addition to current charges, had previously been charged with
threatening to kill two prison officers late last year, and served a previous
stint in jail.
 |
| Masa Vukotic's alleged killer sticks his finger up at media as he is taken into custody. |
The
question we all seem to be asking now is; how many times does the justice
system have to facilitate the crimes of these repeat-offenders, before it has to be held accountable as much as the criminals themselves?
This is the time to say what the Australian justice system
seems unwilling to say; some people are unable to be rehabilitated and we need
to stop behaving as if they are. We look
at foreign nations whose justice systems execute perpetrators of such violent crimes
and condemn them as being “primitive” and “brutal”, yet we foster a system,
which instead allows those same criminals to return to society and re-offend,
and we call ourselves “cultured” and “considerate”.
An Australian Bureau
of Statistics study in 2008-09 found that, excluding Western Australia, nearly
three-quarters (74%) of offenders had at least one police proceeding against them. More recently, a Sentencing Advisory Council
report on re-offending looked at seven years of results from Victoria's busiest
jurisdiction, the Magistrates' Court. It
found convicted criminals are most likely to re-offend, especially those who
have been to jail. More specifically, the
report states that “an offender who has been sentenced twice or more is 193.4
per cent more likely to re-offend than a person with no recent sentences.
Even a single recent sentence makes a person 95.1 per cent
more likely to re-offend.”
Stop and let this sink in for a moment. We live in a country that refuses to take a
firm stance on crime it can’t profit from.
Allow me to make an example; if you’re fined for even a minor traffic infringement and you choose to appeal the fine and appear in court, you must pay for
your own legal representation and any costs incurred if your appeal is
unsuccessful. On the other hand, Ms.
Vukotic’s “alleged” killer is provided with “free” legal representation, which
to add insult to injury is only “free” because it’s covered by tax payers. This means, that we’re living in a system
where it is completely possible that the family of Ms. Vukotic is indirectly having
to pay for the legal defence of the man charged with murdering their daughter.
We all have rights.
The question here is; at what point does one forfeit their rights? At what point does one commit a crime so
heinous that they are exempt from the rights afforded to the rest of society.
Perhaps what hurts us most is that we don’t see action as
much as we hear excuses. We have a
justice system that puts our police in a position where the best they can do is
tell women to take
care walking in parks. That’s an
absolute cop out. This is a massive hole in
the pavement and our justice system seems to have adopted the attitude that
they shall leave it there and simply tell people to take care when walking past
it. It’s their job to fix the hole. Crimes against women in particular are no
longer an “occurrence”, they are a day-to-day reality. Research from the 2012 ABS Personal Safety Survey
and Australian Institute of Criminology shows “over 3 times as many
people experienced violence from a male.”
Our justice system needs to stop putting its head in the sand and
leaving the policing up to the victims rather than taking the action they
either can’t or won’t. The moment a
justice system puts the public in a position that they have to take their protection
into their own hands, is the moment when that system’s existence becomes
obsolete.
When “alleged” killer Sean Price stuck up his middle finger
at cameras as he was taken into custody, he wasn’t simply sticking his finger up
at the cameramen, he was sticking his finger up at Australia. At the families of his previous victims, at
the family of his latest victim and at the millions of people around the world
disgusted by his crimes. He didn’t just
kill who Masa was, he killed who she could have become. He was sticking his finger up and he was
smiling because he’s been processed by a system that has given him the
confidence to believe that his crimes will go unpunished. It’s not naive to say we can do something about
it being the last time something like this happens, but it is reckless to behave
as though it won’t happen again.
This is more than simply an out-pouring of emotion. This is a unified and overwhelming vote of no
confidence by the people in our justice system.
It is essentially their third high-profile strike and they’re out.
**My most sincere condolences to the Vukotic-Celebic families**
Memory Eternal - Vecnaja Pamjat
R.I.P Maลกa
