By John Silvester
- Adrian Bayley trials: Full coverage
- Adrian Bayley's savage history
- Why you weren't told about Bayley's trials
- Police praise victims' bravery
The simple fact is that on September 22, 2012 Adrian Ernest Bayley should have been in jail. He should never have been in a position to attack, rape and kill Jill Meagher as she walked home in Brunswick after a night out with friends.
Jill Meagher should be alive and the system remains condemned by her death.
Any fool looking at the record of Bayley should have known he was likely to offend again and with people like him it is usual their crimes become more violent.
Leave aside the question of why Bayley was paroled in the first place, there is no doubt he should have been back in custody in August 2011 after he viciously attacked a man in Geelong.
Adrian Bayley in police custody after he murdered and raped Jill Meagher.
He should have been breached the day he was arrested but he wasn't. That was a mistake (and they happen) but then the system went mad.
Bayley pleaded guilty to the assault and was jailed for three months. He appealed and for some reason was released on bail. The logic was that he would have served that sentence by the time his appeal was heard. Big deal.
This wasn't just about some violent street crime. Bayley owed the system 11 years from his 2002 sentencing for a series of rapes. Regardless of his sentence for the assault, by his own admission he was guilty of a violent offence.
His parole should have been revoked and then he would not have stalked and killed Jill Meagher. Nor would he have been able to commit other rapes that came to light after the murder.
Jill Meagher was raped and murdered by Adrian Bayley in September 2012. Credit: ABC
There are no votes in parole and that is why the Parole Board has always been the ugly stepsister of the criminal justice system.
In 2009-10 the Justice Department's budget was more than $4 billion while the Parole Board's allocation was $2.5 million. It ran on a 1950s paper filing system, a part time chairman and a staff drowning in applications, requests, reports and parole breaches.
Adrian Bayley outside court in 2013.Credit: Justin McManus
As a result, sufficient notice was not taken of violations and communication between the Board and police was little short of hopeless.
A review of the Parole Board by former High Court judge Ian Callinan found the system failed in Bayley's case.
"It is no answer to say that he had an appeal pending. It was an appeal against sentence only. Bayley was therefore both on parole and on bail when he raped and murdered Ms Meagher.
"He ought to have been known by then to be a recidivist serious, violent sexual offender, with a history of being so from a young age and with an established pattern of doing so."
An internal audit by the Adult Parole Board after Ms Meagher's murder discovered more than 50 serious violent sexual offenders remained free after breaching parole undertakings.
A separate police review found an additional 16 serious sex offenders were living in Victoria without being monitored.
The former government responded to the Callinan review by doubling the Board's budget, appointing retired justice Bill Gillard, QC, as the full time chair and moving paper files to digital.
Now the first priority of parole is community safety, which is why Bayley is the most hated man in the prison system.
Thousands of inmates blame him for a tightening of parole conditions that will result in them doing hundreds of extra years jail.
He remains at the Melbourne Assessment Prison and is isolated from the mainstream.
So is the problem solved? No.
Jails are full and some people who are in custody shouldn't be there. And there are murder cases before the courts that show we are not protecting our vulnerable from violent offenders whose past crimes should have flagged them as likely killers.
As one exasperated detective said, we are ignoring known threats to investigate potential ones.
"Those on our sex offenders registry are more of a threat to us than any terrorist list. They are our urban terrorists. In the last three years three innocent young girls have been killed by known sex maniacs. We have got it wrong with the allocation of resources."