David Penberthy: Unlike Claire Louise Henderson, who has been shamed, this man will remain anonymous

All we know is he’s a former national sporting coach who lives in the eastern suburbs. But his crime was far worse, writes David Penberthy.

This is the story of two court cases involving two very different people, one a hapless, drug-addled woman from a working class area, the other a conniving and perverted middle-class man.

One of them has been named and shamed; the other will remain unknown forever more, with the obvious need to shield his victim’s identity making her tormentor the happy beneficiary of anonymity.

They are wholly unrelated cases, but combined they tell an interesting story about the random nature of justice.

They also beg a bigger question, which is whether we as a community are really doing enough to protect the vulnerable.

Let’s deal with case one first.

In this age of hurt feelings and hypersensitivity, where even the most unpleasant personalities must be afforded empathy or an excuse on account of some past injustice, it was quite bracing to hear such blunt talk emanating from our Magistrates Court.

In the matter of Claire Louise Henderson, 27, of Christies Beach, by her own admission a commercial drug trafficker who sells drugs to fund her habit, Magistrate Susan O’Connor let rip with the kind of no-nonsense language that jars with the mollycoddling nature of our times.

The Magistrate eyeballed the defendant and made it very clear that, in her view, she was not some victim of circumstance but an adult who had chosen the bludger’s path of repeatedly breaking the law by selling drugs to fund her illegal lifestyle.

“Your only interest in life is getting cheap money, cheap drugs and a cheap fix,” the Magistrate told O’Connor.

“Think about the community sitting behind me asking what are you doing in criminal courts to allow these people who do so much harm due to the fact the whole drug trafficking trade means that you’re a parasite and preying on the misfortunes of other people,” she said.

The Magistrate made the comments while Henderson was somewhat audaciously asking if she could have her home detention conditions varied so she could cease living at her dad’s house.

She cited the existing bail arrangements as something of an inconvenience. Labelling the request “ridiculous”, Magistrate O’Connor said Henderson was already doing a poor job abiding by her existing detention arrangements anyway, given she failed a Corrections Department drug test while awaiting trial.

“She’s into party drugs, she uses them everyday and she’s supposed to be on home detention,” Magistrate O’Connor said.

“She’s treating it like a party room. She appears to have complete disregard for any restrictions placed upon her, she has pending matters before the court for similar charges. She’s up to her eyeballs in criminal activity and she is perilously close to the women’s prison.”

Blunt stuff.

Claire Henderson pleaded guilty to commercial drug trafficking. Picture: Facebook

Meanwhile, in the District Court this week, an anonymous man was being sentenced for a crime which many would argue is much more egregious than anything Henderson has done. And unlike Henderson, who has been shamed for her actions, this man will remain anonymous.

All we know about him is that he is successful in his field, as a former national sporting coach, and that he lives in the eastern suburbs.

The reason he was in court was that he secretly rigged up video cameras inside his home so he could video his teenage stepdaughter in her bathroom and bedroom.

This sick process went on for years, so much so that this creep amassed more than 150,000 still images and 130 videos of the poor girl, so vast he had to store them on four USB drives.

His excuse to the court was that he originally only intended to film her for her safety, to make sure she wasn’t sneaking out of the house, but that things took a deviant turn.

Conveniently enough, he also told the court that after he had been arrested (and fuelled no doubt by the fact that he was facing a potentially lengthy stint in jail), he uncovered through psychological counselling the repressed fact that he had been abused as a child.

While the Judge stated that this abuse did not excuse his misconduct, she still took it into account in her sentencing remarks as helping inform his behaviour.

And because almost all of the aforementioned images and videos had been deleted by the man, he could only be sentenced on the basis of the handful of images the police had been able to retain.

His sentence?

A seven-month sentence, only two months of which have to be spent in jail.

It really seems such a pitifully lame sentence.

You think about that poor teenage girl and wonder how she, and her betrayed mother, must feel at all these years of methodical criminality attracting a sentence that befits a serious driving offence.

It is just one of the many cases we read involving kids every day in the paper, where the sentence in no way reflects the impact the crime has on them.

In this case, the perpetrator will be back at his desk in just eight weeks, his workmates none the wiser.

And meanwhile, down in Christies, Claire Louise Henderson has copped the rounds of the kitchen for being part of a modern scourge which is ultimately more of a health problem for people like her than a criminal one.