I wrote a couple of months ago about the bizarre and controversial appointment of Hilary Penfold, a right-wing idealogue with no judicial experience, to the ACT Supreme Court over the strong protests of the Bar Assocation and much of the legal community.
The ACT government, for reasons evident to no one but themselves, went ahead and appointed her anyway, and she took her seat on the court a couple of weeks ago. She’s taken no time to stir up further controversy, delivering an outrageous rape sentence yesterday that looks set to be appealed by the Director of Public Prosecutions.
The defendant in this case was a convicted rapist who broke into a woman’s house and raped her in her bed. Penfold held that, since he had “merely” raped her, and not say, beaten her up some, the offence was “on the lower end of the scale”, and sentenced him such that he will be released on parole in eight months with time served. This is disgusting. I’m relieved the DPP is stepping and appealing the decision, which will hopefully be overturned by the rather more sensible full court, but it makes me furious to see Penfold making exactly the sort of rulings that people warned would happen after all of a week on the bench.
Justice Penfold is a disgrace to the legal profession. Her appointment will go down as one of the most bizarre moments in the territory’s legal history, as to this day no one knows why Australia’s most progressive Attorney-General went to such lengths to appoint such a breathtakingly rotten candidate, and one he’s ideologically opposed to.
Rebecca, where do you get the idea that she’s “a right-wing idealogue”?
Do you actually have any knowledge of her past performance or legal skills and experience? Given your bizarre rantings and complete lack of substance to back it up, I’d be thinking not.
Why don’t you make a detailed critique of her qualifications for the job compared with those others that you would rather see in it, and see who would broaden the overall experience of the court?
Your claim that “we warned you” is just as much bullshit as all those others who claimed that she would be a conservative and are now decrying her suposedly taking into account the “tragic circumstances of an aboriginal offender”. This really shows you up as such a prejudiced dickhead who isn’t willing to just look at the facts.
Warmest regards
Badger
As head of the Department of Parliamentary Services, Penfold was perhaps the most notorious figure in the department’s history, widely accused by the press of politicising the service, limiting the resources available to the (Labor) opposition, and generally being a Howard stooge.
As a lawyer, Penfold had an unusually low level of trial experience for a Supreme Court nominee, which was why the Bar Association and the legal profession more broadly went completely apeshit when she was nominated, and strongly protested her nomination to a level that we haven’t really seen with any other judge here in living memory, and spurred a major push to reform the nomination process. She was before being nominated, quite simply, an unqualified bureaucrat.
The capital is not short of senior lawyers - indeed, Richard Refshauge SC, appointed at the same time as Penfold, was a brilliant choice. My suggestions for the second pick would be, if the intention was to choose a woman (perhaps the only thing Penfold had in her favour) high-profile barrister Pamela Coward or else perhaps ACT Bar Association president George Brzostowski, but that’s hardly the limit of the choices they had at hand - Penfold was a pick right out of left field.
I claimed that she would be unqualified and a conservative, and I was proved right when her first decision was the sort of thing that if she were a man would see her nominated for an Ernie Award, and might well see her nominated for an Elaine this year - she wrote off a convicted rapist who broke into a woman’s home and raped her in her bed as “on the lower end of the scale” and sentenced him to a disgracefully minor sentence. She comes as the latest in a long line of conservative judges who simply do not get sexual assault, and the fact that she’s a woman makes it all the worse.
“Prejudiced dickhead?” Save your bile, and actually go read some “facts” about Penfold.