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In the former penal colony of New South Wales (NSW), a Labor government attempted what its counterpart in Queensland had achieved in 1922: the abolition of the death penalty. Although NSW’s unelected Legislative Council scuttled Labor’s 1925 bill, the party’s prevarication over capital punishment and the government’s poor management of the campaign thwarted abolition for a further three decades. However, NSW’s failure must be analysed in light of ambivalent abolitionism that prevailed in Britain and the US in the postwar decade. In this wider context, Queensland, rather than NSW, was the abolitionist outlier.
This article was first published in Crime Justice Journal: https://www.crimejusticejournal.com/issue/view/119

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list Australia

The abolition of the death penalty in Queensland in 1922 was the first in Australian jurisdictions, and the first in the British Empire. However, the legacy of the Queensland death penalty lingered in Australian colonial territories. This article considers a variety of practices in which the death penalty was addressed by Australian decision-makers during the first half of the 20th century. These include the exemption of Australian soldiers from execution in World War I, use of the death penalty in colonial Papua and the Mandate Territory of New Guinea, hanging as a weapon of war in the colonial territories, and the retrieval of the death penalty for the punishment of war crimes. In these histories, we see not only that the Queensland death penalty lived on in other contexts but also that ideological and political preferences for abolition remained vulnerable to the sway of other historical forces of war and security.
This article was first pubished in Crime Justice Journal: https://www.crimejusticejournal.com/issue/view/119

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list Australia

This article reviews the executions of Australians in the region and the Australian responses over the past two decades. Informed by the author’s legal defence role in death penalty cases in Singapore and Indonesia and other countries, the article explores developments in anti–death penalty advocacy since 2015: the parliamentary enquiry, the ‘whole of government’ strategy led by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the efforts made by Australia and Australians in Asia.
This article was first published in Crime Justice Journal: https://www.crimejusticejournal.com/issue/view/119

• Document type Article
• Countries list Australia

This report examines the extent to which states sanction the killing of sexual minorities. It looks beyond those countries that impose the death penalty for same-sex intimacy to the far greater number of countries in which state actors commission, condone, endorse and enable such killings.
He argues that the state-sanctioned killing of sexual minorities is often perpetrated well beyond the boundaries of the law, and even in countries that do not criminalise such conduct.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list Australia
• Themes list Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment

The raped, strangled and naked body of 12-year-old Alma Tirtschke was found in a right-of-way off nearby Gun Alley. The press, notably the Herald under (Sir) Keith Murdoch, fanned public outrage, pressured police for an arrest and matched the government’s initial reward, which was quickly raised from £250 to £1000. Ross, one of many people routinely interviewed, was arrested and remanded. The police, relying on the information of dubious characters, including the fortune-teller ‘Madame Ghurka’, claimed that Ross had confessed to violating and choking the girl. The Herald prejudiced his trial by publishing his photograph and printing the names and addresses of the jury. George Maxwell, appearing for Ross with T. C. Brennan, described the Crown witnesses as ‘disreputables’, mercenaries whose evidence was contradictory and untrustworthy.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list Australia
• Themes list Networks,

In December 2005 Van Nguyen, a 24 year-old Australian, was hanged by the state of Singapore for heroin trafficking. Filmed across two years, ‘Just Punishment’ tells the remarkable story behind the fight to save his life.

• Document type Multimedia content
• Countries list Australia
• Themes list Foreign Nationals,