Coronavirus: Sentence ‘discount’ offered for judge-only trials

A judge has offered a lawyer an unprecedented sentence ‘discount’ for his client if they agreed to proceed with a judge-alone trial.

A judge has offered a lawyer an unprecedented sentence “discount” for his client if they agreed to proceed with a judge-alone trial and were subsequently found guilty rather than wait for a jury to be available, as the coronavirus pandemic begins to have an impact on the nation’s judicial system.

The move is just one of a series of extreme measures lawyers say courts are being forced to adopt as they try to contend with the suspension of upcoming jury trials.

A senior barrister said a judge presiding over upcoming District Court jury trials at Sydney’s largest court complex, the Downing Centre, instructed at least one lawyer on Monday that their clients “needed to be advised” the court would give considerable sentence discounts for “facilitating the course of justice”.

The barrister said while the size of the discounts was not clear, it was unprecedented to offer a shorter sentence to someone found guilty just because they agreed to a judge-alone trial.

“They are just making it up as they go along, with no practice notes, just a judge saying this will happen,” the barrister said.

NSW, Victoria and Queensland have announced all new jury trials will be cancelled as of next week. As many court hearings as possible will now be heard remotely, with lawyers and judges communicating by audiovisual links or conference calls as the ­judicial system attempts to help stem the spread of the coronavirus.

Senior Sydney criminal lawyers said directives for managing local court criminal matters — which make up 90 per cent of all court proceedings across the country — have so far been “woefully inadequate”.

“No one has got a thought-through response, it’s all just fly by the seat of your pants, and it’s woefully inadequate in the local courts, which is by far the biggest and most difficult jurisdiction of all,” one leading Sydney criminal lawyer told The Australian.

He also described the hygiene at Sydney’s biggest local and district court complex, the Downing Centre, as “horrific”.

He said there needed to be “urgent measures” taken to improve the notoriously poor hygiene in local courts. The problem at the Downing Centre, he said, was particularly acute.

As of Monday, there were still no hand sanitisers available to anyone other than local court sheriffs, and hundreds of people were being forced to use four filthy, broken men’s cubicles in the local court precinct, which were never cleaned. “It’s like a crime scene in there,” the lawyer said.

He also lashed out at the government’s failure to include court precincts like the Downing Centre in its ban on mass gatherings, given there were well over 500 people at the complex at any one time.

“We (lawyers) have been demanding the local courts do something about this shocking lack of hygiene at the Downing Centre for months but nothing has happened — they just don’t seem to care,” one barrister said.

“If they can’t fix a toilet seat, God help us, how are they going to begin to manage this crisis?”

The Australian understands strict new measures will be imposed on local court proceedings in NSW, due to be announced on Tuesday.

One of the biggest challenges the justice system faces is how to manage new prisoners as well as those already on remand who would be kept in prisons longer because of delayed trials.

One prominent Sydney lawyer, who did not want to be named, has predicted there will be “a wave of bail applications” by people who would otherwise be held in custody on arrest because they posed an unacceptable risk for prisons.

“I heard someone got bail on Friday because they had just been tested for the virus and it was agreed that it was in everyone’s interest (he remain in the community) because he still didn’t have the results of the test,” the lawyer said.