Ever since my own arrest on false charges just over a year ago and subsequent 15 weeks and 5 days in jail for refusing to accept the imposed bail conditions, I have felt a growing anger over a specific injustice that is systemic in Australia. I laid out that injustice in an article I wrote just after I was released from prison, but that article dealt with all of the failings of the system, whereas now, with the detainment of Joel Davis, Brandan Koschel and Ryan Turner, I feel compelled to hone in on just one: The length of time the courts take to bring a matter to trial.
In the case of Ryan Turner, he is not awaiting a trial but an appeals hearing (for Tony Burke’s desision to have him deported for being seen in the company of members of a former Australian nationalist organisation at the March for Australia and later exercising in the park with them), but the principle is the same.
Ryan has had a bridging visa denied to him, Joel and Brandan have had bail denied to them. Ryan has been told he must stay in jail for at least a year before his case will be heard, Joel has already spent three months in jail and God knows how long it will be before magistrates will be ready to allow his and Brandan’s cases to conclude in a trial. Tom Sewell spent 7 months in prison waiting for his trial in 2023 only to take a plea deal in October simply to get out of jail. He was senteced to 1 month in prison for assault, it was struck off as “time (already) served”. He was never compensated for the extra 6 months he served and would never have agreed to the plea deal in the first place had the courts and prosecution not been using the delay of his trial as a coercion device.
One year on from my own arrest I have spent a few thousand dollars persuing compensation for the injustice done to me. I am told I will need another $11,000 to bring it to conclusion. My funds are dry. My savings and money from all the kind donations are gone and I am not going to ask for any more. Because I simply don’t trust the courts to give me justice anymore. I have 6 years before the statute of limitations runs out on my abilty to continue the claim. If I manage to replenish my savings in that time I will risk my own money, not other people’s. The financial consequences of going to jail even if found not guilty can continue long after freedom is restored and so it was for me. But that is my cross to bear. I mention it, simply so you have another insight into the many hardships that people all over Australia are enduring every day because of this one systemic corruption of Australia’s judicial system.
Obviously I have highlighted the way this travesty of our legal system has been deliberately abused by police prosecutions and the State Premiers, that put pressure on them, to target nationalists and sympathisers. This issue of taking forever to bring a prosecution to trial (or in Ryan’s case an appeal to be heard) goes way beyond persecuting a few nationalists, though. In my last 3 weeks in jail I was transferred out of solitary confinement and a remand prison and was placed in a cell in a maximum security labour prison with a man accused of attempted murder. He had been on remand awaiting trial for 6 months when I was released. His account of the event was that he was suicidal and poured fuel all over himself in the house and tried to set himself on fire. Luckily for him the fuel that he had spontaneously stolen from the back of the next door neighbour’s ute minutes before was diesel and not petrol. Unluckily for him his girlfriend’s teenage daugher was in her bedroom when he did this act and hence the charge of attempted murder. He was a man who had been in and out of prison for 17 of the 19 years of his adult life. He told me he wanted to be free of the cycle but felt he was never going to get a break. Police just followed him around whenever he got out and used any excuse to arrest and put him on remand. Whether he was guilty or not was irrelevant. Police just used the system to keep him almost permanently off the streets.
If he was going to be in jail even if he didn’t commit crime what was the incentive to stop committing crime? Yet at 37 years old he was tired of crime. He’d had enough. But when I first met him he didn’t think he could escape. In our early conversations he said he didn’t see much point in living anymore.
We were both tranferred to a three person cell just a few days before my charges were dropped and there our new cellmate was a man who had been sitting in jail for 3 months awaiting trial for spitting in the direction of a bus driver whilst drunk. Not a particularly nice thing to do and, indeed the cellmate said he was happy to own up to the fact that he had been way out of line and take the consequences, but should he really be rotting in maximum security for it, for unknown months on end, to probably end up with a caution, a fine or a bit of community service as a sentence? Do you think it’s right for the punishment before conviction to be multiple times worse than the proscibed sentence after it? Because it didn’t just happen to Thomas Sewell. It happens to people every day.
Even if the eventual sentence would be much longer than the punishment received whilst waiting for trial, let me give you one final case to consider. On my last few hours in prison I found myself in a holding cell with 5 other prisoners. One had been on remand, awaiting trial for murder for 5 years. How in any sane society is that acceptable? There is just no reason why it should take that long to give a man his day in court. If a man can be held in jail for 5 years without trial, how can anyone in their right mind claim that we are afforded presumption of innocence in our legal system?
I was flabbergasted, when trying to explain to the magistrate in my own case, by his incomprehension at the abuse of the presumption of innocence, by the constant delay in my trial, whilst having my rights denied (conditions of bail) or being held in captivity (consequence of not agreeing to the bail conditions). It was simply standard procedure for him and the courts he told me. But he assured me I still had the presumption of innocence just before sending me back to my cell in the punishment block.
I had 4 bail hearings. At the end of them the magistrate set a date for a “pretrial”. Excuse my French, but why the fuck would I need a pretrial? I was charged with loitering and later with publicly displaying a symbol associated with Nazi ideology. Either I was or I wasn’t loitering. Either the symbol that was on the patch on my arm was or wasn’t a symbol associated with Nazi ideology. Police are not supposed to charge people with a crime unless they already have evidence. This wasn’t some complex Agatha Christie murder plot requiring 400 pages of evidence to sort through. They either had the evidence, or they didn’t. The same is true with Joel’s case, Brandan’s case and hundreds of non-political cases that crawl at snail’s pace through the court system every day. My magistrate’s reasoning for not going straight to a trial was to “make sure I had a fair trial”. He said it not just with a straight face, but with the dogmatic indoctrinated conviction usually reserved for white feminists in a black lives matter rally calling for justice for George Floyd.
It’s a rort. It’s a con. It’s a money making scam that is lining the pockets of lawyers, prosecutors, magistrates and judges and it makes my blood boil. Not to mention all of the extra costs on the prison system where bail has been refused. It costs the taxpayer an average of $422 a day to keep a man in prison. Thats $155,000 a year per person. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years worth of time measured in people being held in prison awaiting trial in Australia every year. Even when people are released on bail, why should lawyers and magistrates get paid 5 or 6 times for something that should only require their appearance once or twice? The courts aren’t overworked, the courts are corruptly inefficient and bloated.
Yet this has been normal for every person in the court system since their first day of law school and none of them have any ability to recognise it anymore than a feminist can recognise that their gender studies course wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
What applies to the criminal justice system is mirrored in the immigration system. There are men in the immigration prisons who have been in the appeals system for a decade or more. The taxpayer funds it all. Matthew Gruter was gone within weeks rather than go through the appeals system. Meanwhile convicted rapists and murderers realise that immigration prison is a little more chill than regular prison and still preferable to life in the country they came to Australia from. The judges think nothing of waiting a year to hear each case with plenty of preliminary hearings in between. The lawyers love the money, the drug trade inside the prison system pays for it. Like every corrupt system there are always scum of the earth who benefit from it as well as unfortunate victims who are screwed over by it.
The Government, with treasonous help from the Liberal Party, recently passed their Combatting Anti-Semitism and Hate Speech laws. These laws desecrate legal principles that were the basis of the British based legal system that were created 800 years ago with the Magna Carta. Presumption of innocence, due process, no retrospective punishment, etc. Certainly they are the most blatant open desecration of values in our legal system that we hold sacrosanct and must be repealed no matter how long it takes. But long before the government openly descrated our legal system, the courts themselves had perverted it. Whether through arrogance or incompetence our legal system is already a cesspool of injustice. It is easy to pick out the individual cases of bail being given to violent foreigners or bail being denied to White people for hurty words. These are problems of individual corruption and easily exposed when examples in political cases appear. But underneath it all lies a deeper systemic corruption that is so bad 99% of all magistrates think this is how their courts are meant to work. The decision to deny Joel Davis and Brandan Koschel bail requires the magistrates to feign hyper outrage at their status and verbal deeds to justify, but the decision to have multiple pretrial hearings and to put off setting a trial date for months on end is just normal and not worthy of a second thought.
We must impose a maximum time limit of 1 month for a prosecution to bring its case to trial where bail is denied. A trial date should be set after the 1st bail hearing regardless of whether bail is granted or not and only the defence should have the option of having proceedings delayed to prepare their case. Finally any defendant who is denied bail who wins their case or whom the prosecution drops their charges against should have an automatic compensation amount awarded to them for each day they spent in jail. Paid for out of the police budget (that might make them think twice about stitching people up).
I have been motivated to write this because of the plight of brothers in arms and people I know, but I am labelled a Nazi. The “logic” goes that Nazis dehumanise others therefore it’s okay to dehumanise them. Hence why the last “Combatting Antisemetism” etc laws were so easily passed in the first place. Hopefully though, there are people out there who will read this who will put aside the fact that I am a “Nazi” and am motivated to help my fellow Nazis (and a person who simply knew us and chose to take a bit of cash from us to teach us boxing). They will grasp the gravity of the situation as a whole and take action to try and change it.
The amount of time it takes for a person to get their day in court in Australia is not just a disgrace that costs the taxpayer billions of dollars a year, it undermines our civilisation itself. For it makes a mockery of the entire legal system that our civilisation relies upon to function.
The whole concept of justice becomes a farce and a civilisation without justice is no civilisation at all.
You can find Stephen Wells at Telegram and purchase his books here.
