Third edition of pivotal NT legal text hits shelves with focus on language and law
After more than a decade on the bench of the NT Supreme Court and several years as Chief Magistrate before that, Jenny Blokland knows the quirks of Territory justice like the back of her hand.
Police & Courts
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AFTER more than a decade on the bench of the NT Supreme Court and several years as Chief Magistrate before that, Jenny Blokland knows the quirks of Territory justice like the back of her hand.
As the only textbook specifically devoted to those foibles, Justice Blokland’s work — co-authored with Stephen Gray, Ben Grimes and Julian R Murphy — has been required reading for NT law students since 2004.
With the third edition of Criminal Laws Northern Territory hot off the press this year, Justice Blokland said one of the most unique challenges for lawyers in the NT remained its dual system of criminal responsibility, modelled on different sets of rules drafted almost a century apart.
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“We sometimes have cases with multiple charges and sometimes some of the charges can be under one part of the Criminal Code and other charges under the other part,” she said.
“I think we’re able to explain it to juries but I think jurors might sometimes feel ‘Boy, why do we have so many directions about intention in that charge and not in that one’ and so forth.
“So there’s a big difference there actually at the very basics of criminal responsibility.”
The most significant new chapter in the third edition was contributed by Mr Grimes, a lecturer at Charles Darwin University and specialist in language and the law.
Mr Grimes said communication was a significant issue in the NT, a jurisdiction where many Aboriginal people, from victims to perpetrators, were forced to navigate the criminal justice system via an interpreter.
He said while much progress had been made in the past decade in particular, things could still “slip through the cracks, often because of resourcing and time’.
“One would be the amount of time that lawyers have with their clients to properly explain complex legal concepts and get good instructions,” he said.
“When you then bring an interpreter in and doing that through a different world view takes a huge amount of time and lawyers are in positions where they’re having to try and do that with only 15 or 20, 30 minutes.”
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Criminal Laws Northern Territory is published by The Federation Press.
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