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43 results

Page 1 of 3

  • 2168: Lower rates of influenza infection following 2 dose series of high-dose vaccination in plasma cell disorders: Results of a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study

  • Andrew Branagan, Eamon Duffy, Terri Parker, Stuart Seropian, Connor Foster, Lin Zhang, Rakesh Verma, Geliang Gan, Daniel Zelterman, Debra Brandt, Jeremy Kortmansky, David Witt, Madhav Dhodapkar
  • Journal:
    Journal of Clinical and Translational Science / Volume 1 / Issue S1 / September 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    10 May 2018, pp. 31-32
    • Article
      • You have access
      • Open access
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    • Export citation

  • OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: (1) Evaluate safety of a novel influenza vaccination strategy in patients with plasma cell disorders. (2) Measure laboratory-confirmed influenza infection rates following a novel influenza vaccination strategy in patients with plasma cell disorders. (3) Evaluate clinical correlates of response following a novel influenza vaccination strategy in patients with plasma cell disorders. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We conducted a double-blind, randomized study over the 2015–16 flu season, comparing 2 doses of Fluzone® High-Dose influenza vaccination (separated by 30 d) to the current standard of care influenza vaccination. Patients were allocated to the experimental arm in 2:1 ratio compared with standard of care arm. Standard of care influenza vaccination was considered single age-based vaccination (standard dose for those <65 y and high dosefor those ≥65 y) and patients in this arm received a saline placebo injection at 30 days to assist in blinding. Eligibility criteria allowed any patient with a PCD and no contraindication to trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine. The primary endpoint was laboratory-confirmed flu infection rate. Protocol-driven surveillance screened patients for flu-like illnesses and performed laboratory testing for influenza until the end of the flu season in May 2016. Secondary endpoints include HAI titer serologic response rates, clinical correlates of protection from influenza infection, and exploratory studies of cell-mediated immunity through characterization of T cell subpopulations, cytokine profiles, and flu-specific T-cell responsiveness. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: In total, 122 plasma cell disorder patients were enrolled (97 with disease requiring therapy and 25 with asymptomatic gammopathy). Of those 48 patients received a single standard of care influenza vaccination and 74 patients received 2 doses of Fluzone® high-dose vaccine. Median age was 67 years (range 42–90). This 2-dose vaccination strategy was safely tolerated in all patients with no grade 2 adverse events attributed to vaccine. With close clinical follow-up, only 4% of patients receiving 2 vaccine doses developed laboratory confirmed influenza Versus 8.3% of those receiving single vaccine. When compared to the expected CDC influenza infection rate of 10%–15%, 1 sample, 2-tailed binomial testing revealed patients receiving 2 vaccines experienced a significantly lower rate of infection than the expected rate (p<0.05) whereas those receiving single vaccine showed no significant difference (p=0.38). DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: This randomized study demonstrates that the 2 dose strategy of Fluzone® high-dose influenza vaccine is safely tolerated in patients with plasma cell disorders and associated with significantly less than expected laboratory-confirmed influenza infections. The results suggest that this novel vaccination strategy may have a clinical benefit in reducing influenza infections in plasma cell disorder patients and thus may have practice changing implications. Final analyses of serologic responses, clinical correlates of response, and cell-mediated immune correlates may provide valuable insights into in vivo “immune-competence” in patients with plasma cell disorders.

  • 11 - Victims

  • Jeremy Gans, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Modern Criminal Law of Australia
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016, pp 407-441

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Chapter 2 (Choices) set out the central role of people in Australia's criminal justice system. Police, prosecutors, judges and some regulators are active players in determinations of criminal responsibility and the imposition of criminal punishments, and even defendants can play a key role in the course of their prosecution. By contrast, victims’ traditional roles in criminal justice are passive: to be an element of the charged offence and to be a witness (or even an exhibit) at the defendant's trial.

    In recent decades, victims (or, at least, groups claiming to represent victims’ interests) have emerged as a major political force, prompting changes to both offence definitions and official procedures. As was the case with Chapter 2, this chapter does not comprehensively examine the contemporary position of victims in the criminal justice system, but rather analyses the way that choices made by and about victims can affect the boundaries of offence provisions.

    Section 11.2 highlights the conflicting roles of victims, police and courts in contemporary criminal justice. Section 11.3 analyses victims’ place in offence definitions, while the final section, 11.4, examines the impact of their behaviour on determinations of criminal responsibility.

    The topic will be introduced by analysing the contemporary regulation of domestic violence, which now occurs primarily through a system of civil orders, backed by a criminal offence for breaching those orders. This alternative approach to managing crime poses both benefits and risks for victims.

    The problem of victims

    On 17 September 2002, Joseph Brett Hill assaulted his wife Sandrine Ricardo in their Darwin home. His conduct amounted to the following criminal offence:

    Criminal Code (NT)

    188 Common assault

    (1) Any person who unlawfully assaults another is guilty of an offence and, if no greater punishment is provided, is liable to imprisonment for one year.

    (2) If the person assaulted:

    (a) suffers harm;

    (b) is a female and the offender is a male;

    …

    the offender is guilty of a crime and is liable to imprisonment for 5 years.

    Assaults consist of either actual or threatened bodily contact. Touching (both actual and anticipated) is, of course, a routine part of most relationships; however, the word unlawfully limits s188 to touching that no one, notably the person being touched, legally authorised.

  • 10 - Exceptions

  • Jeremy Gans, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Modern Criminal Law of Australia
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016, pp 363-406

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This is the last of three chapters analysing sets of exceptions to the determinative role of elements in criminal law. While Chapter 8 (Groups) and Chapter 9 (Failures) examined doctrines allowing a person to be found guilty of a crime without proof of all the elements, this chapter considers rules that permit a person to be acquitted of a crime despite proof of all the elements.

    Just as there are (almost) countless criminal offences, there are also very many exceptions to criminal offences. Most treatises on criminal law deal almost exclusively with the handful of ‘general defences’ that are set out in the general criminal law: self-defence, necessity, duress, insanity. In keeping with this book's philosophy, the focus of this chapter is instead largely on the many exceptions set out throughout the statute book, in both offence provisions and elsewhere. While the meaning of each exception is a matter of statutory interpretation, some general approaches are identifiable.

    In one sense, exceptions are just further circumstance elements in an offence provision, expressed in a negative form. However, while elements are directed towards defining criminality and responsibility, exceptions are directed towards defining innocence. At least for some types of offending, it is challenging to exhaustively identify all the circumstances when a person should not be convicted of a crime, let alone assess or disprove them. So, many exceptions operate at a high level of generality and dispense with some of the usual niceties of criminal responsibility and proof.

    As the final three chapters of this book (10, 11 and 12) deal with parts of the criminal law that don't purport to be general and whose operation in practice varies dramatically from offence to offence, there will be no chapter-length running examples. Rather, each of these chapters will examine an introductory offence in detail before considering many other offences. In this chapter, the introductory offence is probably the most controversial contemporary crime: abortion, an offence whose boundaries are almost entirely shaped by the law of exceptions.

  • 9 - Failures

  • Jeremy Gans, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Modern Criminal Law of Australia
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016, pp 327-362

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This is the second chapter on sets of exceptions to the determinative role of physical and fault elements in Australian criminal law. Chapter 8 (Groups) detailed how someone can be criminally responsible when an offence's conduct element is done by someone else. This chapter examines how someone can be criminally responsible even when some or even all of the offence's physical elements never occur.

    Many would say that people who try and fail to commit a crime are just as heinous as people who actually commit a crime or assist another to do so. Reflecting this view, Australian criminal law criminalises certain ways that crimes commence. A number of specific offence provisions are defined largely in terms of an intention to achieve a particular end, whether or not the intention succeeds. As well, three general offences – attempt, incitement and conspiracy – criminalise aspects of the lead-up to every offence.

    Section 9.2 examines the difficulty caused by failed crimes and the solution of criminalising those failures. Section 9.3 analyses Australia's general and specific offences for the beginnings of criminal behaviour and the central requirement of an intention that the crime occur. Section 9.4 discusses the very limited scenarios where a defendant can avoid criminal responsibility for failed crimes.

    The running example in this chapter is money laundering. Money is ubiquitous as both a motivation and a tool for many contemporary crimes, ranging from tax evasion to drug trafficking and terrorism. It is also a major focus of policing and regulation, with the purpose of converting criminal activities into failures for criminals. In turn, both the general criminal law and a variety of specific financial offences prevent these investigative successes from becoming prosecutorial failures.

    The problem of failures

    Trafficking offences, the running example in Chapter 5 (Circumstances), cover the most visible part of a much larger chain of criminal behaviour: in the case of drug trafficking, a cycle of manufacture of illicit goods, international distribution, local distribution, local sales and the channelling of money back to each participant. Such chains are extremely hard to detect. Worse still, when they are detected, police often achieve relatively little. Criminal organisations manage the risk of police intervention by ensuring that the goods and money spend most of their time in the hands of non-entities with little knowledge of the wider conspiracy.

  • 7 - Standards

  • Jeremy Gans, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Modern Criminal Law of Australia
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016, pp 249-285

  • Summary

    Introduction

    The first six chapters of this book set out how questions of criminal responsibility and punishment are usually resolved under Australian law. The scope of each offence is a product of:

  • • the offence provision itself (Chapter 1), which sets out the crime's physical elements and may also set out further requirements

  • • pre-trial choices (Chapter 2) about whether and how to determine whether a particular person has committed a particular crime

  • • the general criminal law, which imposes requirements beyond the offence provision, potentially including fault elements corresponding to each conduct (Chapter 3), result (Chapter 4) and circumstance (Chapter 5) element

  • • the court's assessment of the seriousness of the actual offending (Chapter 6), which determines the outer boundary of what can happen to someone who admits or is found to have breached an offence provision.

    • This chapter explores crimes where the above system is too simplistic and alternative standards for assessing criminality apply.

    Defining crimes in terms of particular facts and judging criminals by what they knew or ought to have known about those facts can be under-inclusive, over-inclusive or simply inapt. That is because some offending can only be identified by assessing what the offender did according to a standard of behaviour.

    Section 7.2 identifies the role and complexity of such standards through a detailed analysis of the first occasion that the High Court applied the federal Criminal Code. Sections 7.3 and 7.4 analyse attempts to broaden Australian criminal law to more aptly cover two types of non-factual standards: assessments of risk, in other words, the consequences that might (but didn't) flow from the defendant's conduct; and assessments of morality, that is, others’ judgment of the defendant's conduct.

    The running example in this chapter is a landmark offence under both international and federal law: slavery, a crime against humanity whose abolition is a hallmark of contemporary civilisation; however, the discussion is not limited to the crime itself. Rather, in order to explore the criminal law's attempts to better identify offenders, this chapter examines how contemporary acts of actual or possible slavery may involve (and can be criminalised in terms of) the offender's contravention of standards of safety and morality. In its traditional definition, and in these non-traditional versions, the challenge is to incorporate external standards into the scheme of Australia's general criminal law.

  • 6 - Sentences

  • Jeremy Gans, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Modern Criminal Law of Australia
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016, pp 209-248

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Chapter 2 (Choices) discussed how every criminal trial is preceded by myriad decisions by lay and legally trained state officials, which can operate to alter the effect of statutory offence provisions. This chapter concerns an equally important decision that follows every successful criminal prosecution: the choice about what to do with someone who has been found guilty of an offence. In the Australian criminal justice system, this choice generally involves a judge deciding what punishment may be imposed on the offender and a series of subsequent choices by government officials about how to carry out that punishment. This chapter is concerned with the judge's ‘sentencing’ decision.

    Like the law of criminal procedure, sentencing law (and the even vaster practice and politics of punishment) is an enormous field that would require a lengthy treatise to cover even a single jurisdiction. This chapter's focus is narrower, examining how courts assess offence seriousness, the upper limit on most Australian sentencing.

    The chapter first examines how sentencing decisions can overshadow both the meaning of offence provisions and the fine distinctions drawn by the general criminal law, replacing the handful of offence elements with a nearly infinite set of sentencing factors (6.2). The factors that inform a court's determination of the seriousness of an instance of offending are then analysed (6.3). Section 6.4 will discuss categories of factors that Australian law excludes from that assessment.

    A category of crimes that has been a lightning rod for critiques of criminal law and practice, sexual offences, is the running example for the discussion of sentencing and offence seriousness. Sexual offences are of considerable significance in all systems of criminal law, both as a classic instance of an offence consisting of conduct and circumstance elements and as a key object of law reform efforts; however, the sentencing of such offences, while of equal interest, has received comparatively less attention.

    The problem of sentences

    Until recent decades, Australia's High Court refused to hear any appeals on the adequacy of sentences, citing the lack of any ‘point of law of general application’ in such cases. One of the first exceptions the court made to that approach was the 1987 sentencing appeal of Kevin Ibbs.

  • 3 - Conduct

  • Jeremy Gans, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Modern Criminal Law of Australia
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016, pp 87-128

  • Summary

    Introduction

    The previous chapters described Australia's criminal law as a marriage of the words in each statutory offence and the people who make choices about enforcing each offence. This chapter introduces the third (and final) partner: each Australian jurisdiction also has a ‘general criminal law’, which strongly influences (and often determines) many questions about whether or not someone is a criminal.

    This chapter outlines both the notion of a general criminal law and one of the general law's foundational concepts: criminal conduct. Section 3.2 sets out the central but difficult role played by conduct in Australian criminal justice and the way that the general criminal law may solve some of those difficulties. The remaining sections respectively set out the general criminal law's conditions for making people criminally responsible for their conduct and noteworthy scenarios when those conditions may not be satisfied.

    The chapter's running illustration of the regulation of criminal conduct is the category of criminal offence that is most commonly prosecuted in Australia: driving offences. As driving is widely practised and broadly regulated with offence provisions that are routinely enforced, it is unsurprising that this category demonstrates all of the key issues relating to criminal responsibility for actions and other behaviour.

    The problem of conduct

    The central and problematic nature of conduct in criminal law can be seen by considering one of the most commonly committed types of crime: traffic offences, such as the following SA provisions:

    Motor Vehicles Act 1959 (SA)

    9 Duty to register

    (1) A person must not drive an unregistered motor vehicle, or cause an unregistered motor vehicle to stand, on a road.

    Maximum penalty: $7500.

    91 Effect of suspension and disqualification

    …

    (5) A person must not drive a motor vehicle on a road while his or her licence or learner's permit is suspended or while disqualified in this State or another State or Territory of the Commonwealth from holding or obtaining a licence or learner's permit.

    Maximum penalty:

    For a first offence – imprisonment for 6 months.

    For a subsequent offence – imprisonment for 2 years.

    …

    102 Duty to insure against third party risks

    (1) A person must not drive an uninsured motor vehicle, or cause an uninsured motor vehicle to stand, on a road.

  • 5 - Circumstances

  • Jeremy Gans, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Modern Criminal Law of Australia
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016, pp 166-208

  • Summary

    Introduction

    We typically associate crimes with conduct and punishment with consequences; however, the balance of many offence provisions concerns the surrounding context. Criminalisation based primarily on the circumstances that accompany often mundane actions has proved to be an irresistible convenience in modern statutes. Despite (or perhaps because of) the absence of any need to prove voluntariness or causation, circumstance elements are the most fraught physical element in Australian criminal law. Indeed, this chapter is one of the longest (and most difficult) in this book, mainly because there are so many possible circumstances and so many possible ways of determining criminal responsibility for them.

    Like the previous chapters on conduct and results, this chapter's analysis of circumstance elements first explains why they are problematic. It then sets out the general criminal law's requirements for circumstances and the main scenarios where a person will not be criminally responsible for them.

    The running illustration used in this chapter is one of the most complex fields of criminalisation: trafficking (i.e., illicit transactions). The regulation of trafficking raises difficult questions of criminal responsibility about the potentially damning circumstances that may attend otherwise ordinary activities. As will be seen below, one of the most significant criminal trafficking regimes, drug offences, has been the occasion for the most important Australian decision on criminal responsibility, He Kaw Teh v R.

    The problem of circumstances

    Just three federal crimes currently attract a mandatory minimum sentence. All three involve a bête noire of contemporary federal politicians, so-called ‘people smuggling’: specifically bringing people to Australia outside regular channels. One offence provides for a mandatory minimum sentence of eight years’ imprisonment if the people smuggler either subjects the victim to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or her conduct gives rise to a danger of death or serious harm to the victim. These elements are, respectively, conduct and result elements, and the heinousness of both is apparent.

    However, the other, much more commonly prosecuted, offence is different:

    Migration Act 1958 (Cth)

    233C Aggravated offence of people smuggling (at least five people)

    (1) A person (the first person) commits an offence if:

    (a) the first person organises or facilitates the bringing or coming to Australia, or the entry or proposed entry into Australia, of a group of at least 5 persons (the other persons); and

  • 4 - Results

  • Jeremy Gans, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Modern Criminal Law of Australia
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016, pp 129-165

  • Summary

    Introduction

    It is natural to think of a crime as something someone does, hence the concept of ‘criminal conduct’, which is the subject of Chapter 3 (Conduct). However, a typical reason to punish someone is the consequences of her behaviour, most famously expressed in Mill's ‘harm principle’:

    That the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will is to prevent harm to others.

    It is certainly possible to justify the criminalisation of mere conduct under this principle (e.g., because of the potential harm of driving, Chapter 3's running example). However, an alternative approach is to include one or more harmful (or potentially harmful) results as a physical element in an offence provision. This chapter examines the challenges posed by result elements and the general criminal law's response to them.

    Section 4.2 outlines why results pose difficulties in terms of both interpreting offences and attributing responsibility. The remainder of the chapter outlines the general criminal law's requirements for results and the significant scenarios where a person won't be criminally responsible for them.

    While criminal law has a long history of criminalising harm to people and property, a signature development in modern criminal law is the development of liability for harm to the environment. Not only do the variety and scope of contemporary offences prohibiting environmental harm illustrate the difficulties of defining responsibility for results but they are also a key context where the general criminal law has been developed and refined, both in Australia and overseas.

    The problem of results

    The main WA pollution offence provides:

    Environmental Protection Act 1986 (WA)

    49 Causing pollution and unreasonable emissions

    …

    (3) A person who causes pollution or allows pollution to be caused commits an offence.

    The word pollution conjures images of oil on water and wildlife, but it is also used to describe more diffuse impacts (like chlorofluorocarbons that damage the ozone layer and greenhouse gases that cause global warming) and quite different environmental problems (e.g., noise and light pollution). Such problems can be dealt with by regulating particular types of conduct that can cause pollution, such as waste creation and disposal, and regulation of building and machinery.

  • 8 - Groups

  • Jeremy Gans, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Modern Criminal Law of Australia
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016, pp 286-326

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Chapters 3, 4 and 5 explored the general criminal law's core requirement that the prosecution must prove all the physical and fault elements for an offence. In the federal code, that requirement is set out in s3.2:

    Criminal Code (Cth)

    Establishing guilt in respect of offences

    In order for a person to be found guilty of committing an offence the following must be proved:

  • (a) the existence of such physical elements as are, under the law creating the offence, relevant to establishing guilt;

  • (b) in respect of each such physical element for which a fault element is required, one of the fault elements for the physical element.

    • This chapter and the next two discuss three broad exceptions – actually, sets of exceptions – to this principle (and the identical common law rule and similar traditional code one). The first set, detailed in this chapter, allows for a person to be found guilty of an offence even though the conduct element of the offence was actually committed by someone else.

    Conduct, with its associated requirements of voluntariness and intent, is usually conceived of as individual endeavour. However, many things that humans do are done in groups. The group may be a formal entity, or an informal community, or a temporary gathering, or just one person helping – or using – another. All these types of groups are responsible for most of the world's great works and many of its crimes. Australia's general criminal law deals with the diversity of group crime by adapting or creating new principles of criminal responsibility.

    Section 8.2 explores the problem of group crimes by discussing how Australia's general criminal law regulates activities of legally recognised organisations. Section 8.3 then sets out how the general criminal law links individuals together, through overlapping doctrines of criminal responsibility for others’ conduct, offending and offences. Section 8.4 discusses the scenarios when one person can escape responsibility for another's behaviour.

    The previous chapter introduced the offences of general endangerment, which are based on assessing the risks from one person's conduct; however, groups have a much greater capacity to both endanger others and to protect them.

  • Preface

  • Jeremy Gans, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Modern Criminal Law of Australia
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016, pp x-xi

  • Summary

    As I finalised the manuscript for this text in mid-May 2016, the High Court heard three joint appeals arising from an incident in northern Adelaide where two people were stabbed, one fatally. This is the kind of crime that is the heart and soul of most criminal law texts: a violent crime involving defendants with all the tragic empirical correlates of adjudicated criminality in Australia (male, young, poor, drunk and Indigenous). Moreover, because it occurred in South Australia (and involved homicide, complicity and foresight), it is also a case governed almost entirely by case law, specifically Australia's common law on murder, complicity and intoxication. None of the appellants’ submissions discusses the terms of any statute.

    And yet, this case also demonstrates the limits of an analysis of Australian criminal law that centres on key crimes, correlates and case law. South Australia is now the only Australian jurisdiction where statutes wouldn't play a significant role in a case like this. It is one of just two jurisdictions (the other being Victoria) that doesn't have a statutory definition of murder and one of two (the other being New South Wales) that doesn't have a statutory definition of complicity. The main issue before the High Court – whether Australia's common law on extended joint criminal enterprise took a ‘wrong turn’ in 1995, as the United Kingdom Supreme Court and Privy Council ruled that the common law administered by those courts did a few months ago – only matters now in two Australian states (as discussed in this text at 8.3.3). All the other jurisdictions solved this problem (for better or worse) by statute, including Victoria in 2014, and the remainder are likely to follow, regardless of how the High Court rules. Moreover, as outlined in Box 8.2, on previous occasions where the High Court has been asked to make such a ruling, it has held that fixing any error in the common law is a job for legislatures, not the common law. Such an approach, if followed again, means that the High Court has effectively abdicated its former role of developing Australia's common law on crime, leaving only the legislature to fill the breach. In short, the future of Australian criminal law, even in its homicidal heartland, looks profoundly statutory, with the courts’ primary substantive role one of statutory interpretation.

  • Introduction

  • Jeremy Gans, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Modern Criminal Law of Australia
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016, pp 1-19

  • Summary

    This book presents Australia's criminal law as a vast set of statutory provisions, mostly consisting of provisions defining criminal offences. It examines how to read such offence provisions and how they are applied by and to various people.

    Somewhat surprisingly, this is a radically different approach from the ones taken in most criminal law books. It may even be unique.

    Here, I explain my reasons for taking this approach and identify the book's main characteristics that flow from its approach. I also set out how this book may be used by a variety of readers, ranging from practitioners to law students.

    The problem of criminal law books

    If a non-lawyer was asked to describe the criminal law, she is very likely to say that it consists of ‘crimes’. If pressed on where to find those crimes, she would probably say that they are listed in a special crime statute, such as a ‘Criminal Code’. This take on the criminal law is probably more accurate than lay views of just about any other area of the law. Nevertheless, criminal law experts know that there is more to the picture.

    In particular, the criminal law's scope:

  • • extends well beyond the well-known offences that appear in special crime statutes. It includes a huge and constantly changing array of regulatory offences that are scattered throughout the statute book.

  • • is not fully defined by offence provisions. Rather, the scope of the provisions can be expanded or contracted in various ways by other, more general criminal law rules in each jurisdiction.

  • • is dominated in practice by discretions exercised by government officials, among others. Some of these choices are closely constrained by legal rules, while others are almost unregulated.

    • So, while a layperson might imagine that all criminal law books consist of descriptions of each ‘crime’, in fact there is no such thing. To be sure, there are ‘annotations’ available of the major crime statutes in most jurisdictions, but they are a niche product aimed at working lawyers and don't provide either a comprehensive or an accessible description, let alone analysis, of any jurisdiction's criminal law.

Modern Criminal Law of Australia
  • 2nd edition
  • Jeremy Gans
  • Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016
  • Modern Criminal Law of Australia, 2nd edition is a comprehensive guide to interpreting and understanding every statutory offence provision in every Australian jurisdiction. The text takes a unique approach to explaining Australian criminal law, emphasising the importance of statutory interpretation, official discretion, element analysis and sentencing, in order to appreciate the meaning and effect of any offence provision. This book sets out the rules and skills needed to advise clients on the potential application of criminal law throughout Australia. Its scope extends to both serious and minor regulatory regimes, as well as the entire contemporary breadth of criminal law, ranging from pollution to public order, traffic to trafficking, and domestic violence to work safety. It covers the common law, traditional code and model code systems, and includes detailed examples from all states. As such, this unique book provides students with the skills to practice law anywhere in Australia.

  • 12 - States

  • Jeremy Gans, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Modern Criminal Law of Australia
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    05 December 2016, pp 442-478

  • Summary

    Introduction

    States are the dominant players in Australian criminal justice. Not only are state agents – police, prosecutors, regulators and courts – the key decision-makers in criminal process (see Chapter 2: Choices) but state institutions – the executive, parliament and courts – are also the source or interpreters of all statutory offence provisions (see Chapter 1: Words). It is less widely recognised that states can also play other roles: as victims of some crimes and as complicit in (or even perpetrators of) others.

    This final chapter examines the role of government as the subject, object and context of many breaches of the criminal law. Section 12.2 considers the conflicting roles of states in the criminal law. Section 12.3 sets out the role of states in offence definitions and exceptions. The final section, 12.4, examines the potential impact of state behaviour on others’ criminal responsibility.

    As in the previous two chapters, there is no single criminal law of statehood and the role of states varies from offence to offence. The topic will be introduced through the example of land crimes, including conservation laws, planning laws and trespass. Land has long been both a focus and a venue for political activism, and is a context where the state plays multiple roles as source, regulator and protector of land rights and as the principal owner and user of land.

    The problem of states

    The old brewery site on Perth's Swan River foreshore is a locus for almost every controversy in Australian urban land policy. Until a century and a half ago, the land was a regular campsite for south-west Australia's Nyungar people, who believed that Waugal, the rainbow serpent known to Aboriginals across Australia, had a presence there. The European founders of Perth initially set up a station there in an attempt to contain the indigenous community, but later banned them from the area as it became part of the city's Kings Park. The site's proximity to the water facilitated a variety of commercial uses, including as the iconic Swan Brewery. Eventually, Perth's residents came to appreciate its beauty, in part because a four-lane highway built straight through it gave them regular access.

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