Landmark pepper spray trial in crime-hit community

A landmark trial allowing the public sale of pepper spray for self defence is set to be introduced by a crime-troubled territory.
The Northern Territory is set to become only the second jurisdiction in the country to allow residents to carry pepper spray, giving people "more choice when it comes to personal safety".
Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro said a 12-month trial was set to launch from September, allowing approved members of the public to carry a low-percentage Oleoresin Capsicum (OC) spray under strict legal conditions.
The move was part of the NT government's justice reforms that focus on reducing crime and restoring community safety and security, she said.
"We're strengthening the frontline with more police, stronger laws and better prevention, but we also believe individuals should have lawful tools to protect themselves if needed," Ms Finocchiaro said in a statement.
Ms Finocchiaro's government made law and order the cornerstone of its first budget with a record $1.5 billion investment in corrections, courts and police.
The NT government also lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10 and introduced tougher bail laws.
Data shows the NT has an incarceration rate three times greater than anywhere else in Australia and has the highest reoffending rate, with six out of 10 prisoners returning to jail within two years of release.
Consultation to determine the trial's specifics will be led by NT Police, industry bodies, licensees, other key stakeholders and the broader community.
The initiative would ensure the NT joins Western Australia as the only jurisdictions in Australia allowing residents to carry pepper spray.
"This is about giving Territorians more choice when it comes to personal safety," the chief minister said.
"This is about equipping Territorians with more options, not less control."
Approved OC spray is set to be made available for purchase from licensed dealers across the NT from September 1.
The NT proposal comes as a class action trial in Victoria winds up involving climate protester Jordan Brown challenging the police's use of pepper spray against him during a mining protest.
His lawyers have told the Supreme Court that Victoria Police's use of the spray on him at a 2019 protest outside the International Mining and Resources Conference in Melbourne was violent and excessive.
But lawyers for Victoria Police claim the use of force was lawful, as protesters were impeding officers from making an arrest.
Closing submissions before Judge Claire Harris are being heard on Wednesday and Thursday.

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ABC News

5 hours ago

• ABC News

Erin Patterson's mushroom murder trial jury soon to put the puzzle pieces together

For seven weeks, jigsaw pieces have been shaken out before the jury in Erin Patterson's triple-murder trial. Dozens of witnesses were called and exhibits ranged from photos allegedly showing death cap mushrooms being dehydrated in the lead-up to the murders, to reams of data extracted from seized electronic devices. The trial of Erin Patterson, who stands accused of using a poisoned meal to murder three relatives, continues. Look back at how Thursday's hearing unfolded in our live blog. To stay up to date with this story, subscribe to ABC News. In the trial's eighth week, the prosecution and defence used those pieces to assemble and present two contrasting pictures to the jury. The prosecution told the jury the pieces clicked into place to reveal Ms Patterson as a murderer, who had deliberately killed three relatives and attempted to murder a fourth. The lunch she had hosted at her regional Victorian home in 2023 was built on a series of deceptions, the prosecution alleged. The lethal one, lead prosecutor Nanette Rogers SC said, was Ms Patterson's lacing of the beef Wellington meals she served to her relatives. "The sinister deception was to use a nourishing meal as the vehicle to deliver a deadly poison," Dr Rogers told the Supreme Court jury. She invited the jury to consider the pieces of evidence around the "deviations" Ms Patterson made to the original beef Wellington recipe. While the method in the mother of two's cookbook called for a log of meat, individual eye fillets were used. Ms Patterson told the court that was because individual eye fillets were the only ones she could find. The prosecutor suggested that was a lie and the truth was far more calculated. "That choice to make individual portions allowed her complete control over the ingredients in each individual parcel," Dr Rogers said. "It is a control … that she exercised with devastating effect. "It allowed her to give the appearance of sharing in the same meal, whilst ensuring that she did not consume a beef Wellington parcel that she had laced with death cap mushrooms." Ms Patterson's decision to dump her food dehydrator (later found to contain death cap mushroom residue) at the tip and then lie to police about it was behaviour the prosecution said could be slotted together to form incriminating conduct. "If there was nothing incriminating about the dehydrator, why hide it?" Dr Rogers rhetorically asked the jury. "There is only one reasonable explanation: she knew it would incriminate her. "She knew that she had dehydrated death cap mushrooms in that appliance and that she had done deliberately done so, and she knew that keeping it was going to be far too risky." The prosecutor told the jury the evidence laid before them did not point to any "particular motive" for the crime, but this was not a requirement of the murder charges. "The question is not why she did this," she said. "The question you have to determine is: has the prosecution proved beyond reasonable doubt that the accused did this deliberately?" While not alleging a particular motive, the prosecution placed more pieces of trial evidence before the jury to fill out its puzzle. Facebook messages with friends showed Ms Patterson's animosity towards her Patterson in-laws and mockery of their deeply held religious beliefs, Dr Rogers said. "She presented one side while expressing contrary beliefs to others." In concluding her address, the prosecutor told the jury the legal bar for proving murder beyond reasonable doubt had been "well and truly met". When all of the evidence was combined, Dr Rogers suggested the jury would be satisfied the accused had deliberately sought out death caps and served them to her relatives with malicious intent. "One piece on its own or by itself might tell you not very much at all about what the picture is," she said. "But as you start putting more and more pieces together and looking at it as a whole, the picture starts to become clear." She said while jurors may feel the alleged murders were "too horrible, too cold and beyond your comprehension", they needed to remain focused on the evidence. "Don't let your emotional reaction dictate your verdict, one way or the other," Dr Rogers said. When Ms Patterson's defence barrister Colin Mandy SC rose to his feet, he told the jury the absence of an alleged motive meant the prosecution's jigsaw was incomplete. "Without a motive, you're left guessing about the most important element of the offence in this trial and that's intention," Mr Mandy said. He walked through some of the tense communications between the accused and her estranged husband Simon Patterson several months before the lunch. But he said the picture they painted was a fairly ordinary one of two separated people managing the joint care of their young children. "There is nothing unusual about it. In fact, quite the opposite," Mr Mandy said. "It would be in some cases unusual if there wasn't that kind of spat or disagreement or frustration. He accused the prosecution of putting before the jury a series of "ridiculous, convoluted propositions" that were not supported by the evidence. He said Ms Patterson's simpler explanation of a dreadful "accident" was a truthful one that had emerged "unscathed" after days of cross-examination. "Her account remained coherent and consistent, day after day after day, even when challenged, rapid fire, from multiple angles, repeatedly," he said. Under that explanation, a Tupperware container in Ms Patterson's Leongatha pantry contained a mix of dried mushrooms from an Asian grocer and ones she had foraged from the Gippsland region. In that mix, Mr Mandy suggested, were the death cap mushrooms later added to the lunch. "The prosecution says she had them deliberately, the defence says she had them accidentally," he said. He told them Ms Patterson's actions after the lunch were the panic of an innocent woman in the aftermath of a ghastly accident. "Erin got into the witness box and told you, she did those things because she panicked when confronted with the terrible possibility, terrible realisation, that her actions had caused the illnesses of people that she loved," he said. In closing, Mr Mandy told jurors the prosecution had tried to "force the evidence to fit their theory in a way that does not apply to jigsaw puzzle pieces". "Stretching interpretations, ignoring alternative explanations because they don't align perfectly with the narrative," he said. "Missing puzzle pieces in a jigsaw puzzle can make the picture incomplete, but missing evidence is much more significant." He reminded the jury that if they did not accept all of Ms Patterson's evidence as truthful, they needed to set it to the side and consider whether the evidence actually existed to prove murder and attempted murder beyond reasonable doubt. After both sides in a trial that has astounded observers around the world had finished their address, the judge indicated the most important part lay ahead. Justice Christopher Beale will begin delivering his final instructions to the jury on Tuesday, which he said would break down the legal principles at stake in the case. After that, it will fall to the jury to begin piecing the puzzle together themselves.

The Age

7 hours ago

• The Age

Rising youth crime allowed to fester on Labor's watch

'We cannot arrest our way out of this. It's that simple … The whole arrest, charge, bail, remand, court system, justice system, youth detention, can't be just the answer.' When Victoria Police's Sergeant Tem Hawkes said these words to The Age two years ago, rising youth crime was already a long-standing problem. As we reported in our youth crime investigation in 2023, adolescents and early teenagers (aged 10-14) were the fastest-growing cohort of youth offenders involved in violent crime. At Werribee Police Station, Hawkes and his fellow officers were part of the Embedded Youth Outreach Program (EYOP), in which youth workers accompanied police on patrols to try to give young people a pathway out of crime. The program was not born out of woolly idealism but out of a hard-headed assessment by all involved that traditional law-and-order responses weren't working, and could in fact be making things worse. Its interventions with young people reduced their reoffending, even as rates of offending beyond the program continued to rise, according to a Swinburne University evaluation that forecast 1000 fewer offences on an annual basis as a result. This week's news that youth crime is reaching record levels comes against a very different backdrop. The state government, struggling with budgetary woes in other areas, has cut back funding to EYOP and the Youth Support and Advocacy Service, which provides the program with social workers, and returned to pouring money into prisons. All the while there is real community concern about rising crime rates, especially youth crime, with neighbourhoods increasingly turning to private security and home-surveillance devices. From Labor promising to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 – a first step to dealing with the youngest offenders outside the setting of jail, which is proven to turn many of them into adult criminals – we now have Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny measuring success by the doubling of young people on remand since last year. Loading From its reversal on changing the age of criminal responsibility to the about-face on bail laws to the recent hop, skip and jump to a machete ban after the Northland shopping centre brawl, the Allan government gives the impression of making up its responses on the run, after scanning the headlines and considering only the political optics.

The Advertiser

12 hours ago

• The Advertiser

'Vicious murder': one of seven charged after Beaumont Street stabbing makes bail bid

A SUPREME Court judge has described the fatal stabbing of James Callahan on Beaumont Street last year as a "vicious murder" as one of seven people charged made a bid for bail on Friday. Dianne Fernando, 39, will have to wait until at least next week to find out if she will be let out on bail after Acting Justice Monika Schmidt told the court she needed more time to reflect on arguments put forward. Police allege Fernando was driving one of the vehicles captured on CCTV on the night of the fatal stabbing at Hamilton on November 17, 2024. Crown prosecutor Liam Shaw opposed Fernando's bail bid, calling the alleged murder a "shocking crime". "The Crown hasn't included the footage because it is too distressing to watch," he said. Mr Shaw alleged Fernando moved the car she was driving one to two metres closer to the altercation that took Mr Callahan's life, blocking the street and "providing lighting" to the people stabbing him. "It's not just the provision of the knife; from the beginning to the end, the applicant played a part in this episode," he said. Fernando was arrested after detectives from Newcastle's proactive crime team stopped a car on Albert Street at Lambton just before 1pm on February 4. Her solicitor argued elements of the Crown case were "circumstantial" and that if she was to be refused bail, Fernando could remain in custody until a trial at the end of 2026 or the start of 2027. "What we say in terms of the police case against Fernando is that it is largely based on CCTV of her movements, the use of her mobile phone, her proximity to what happened and something a witness heard that they said she said," he said. "Ms Fernando maintains what she said to the police in a statement provided to them that in terms of ultimately what happened, she didn't know what was going on, she wasn't told anything, and she was dumbfounded." The court heard that one of the passengers in the car claims she heard Fernando tell another passenger she shouldn't have given her a knife. Fernando's solicitor argued it was her first time in custody and that before she was arrested, she cared for five of her seven children. He said that prior to being arrested, Fernando suffered serious mental health issues and had sought help from her GP. Acting Justice Schmidt said she expected to deliver her decision early next week. Fernando's solicitor said she had "some criminal history largely made up of driving offences and more recently, but not too recently, some larcenies, fraud and an affray" and mentioned she was on a community corrections order at the time. Newcastle City police officers have been investigating the alleged murder of Mr Callahan under Strike Force Mannum, backed by the State Crime Command's homicide squad. A SUPREME Court judge has described the fatal stabbing of James Callahan on Beaumont Street last year as a "vicious murder" as one of seven people charged made a bid for bail on Friday. Dianne Fernando, 39, will have to wait until at least next week to find out if she will be let out on bail after Acting Justice Monika Schmidt told the court she needed more time to reflect on arguments put forward. Police allege Fernando was driving one of the vehicles captured on CCTV on the night of the fatal stabbing at Hamilton on November 17, 2024. Crown prosecutor Liam Shaw opposed Fernando's bail bid, calling the alleged murder a "shocking crime". "The Crown hasn't included the footage because it is too distressing to watch," he said. Mr Shaw alleged Fernando moved the car she was driving one to two metres closer to the altercation that took Mr Callahan's life, blocking the street and "providing lighting" to the people stabbing him. "It's not just the provision of the knife; from the beginning to the end, the applicant played a part in this episode," he said. Fernando was arrested after detectives from Newcastle's proactive crime team stopped a car on Albert Street at Lambton just before 1pm on February 4. Her solicitor argued elements of the Crown case were "circumstantial" and that if she was to be refused bail, Fernando could remain in custody until a trial at the end of 2026 or the start of 2027. "What we say in terms of the police case against Fernando is that it is largely based on CCTV of her movements, the use of her mobile phone, her proximity to what happened and something a witness heard that they said she said," he said. "Ms Fernando maintains what she said to the police in a statement provided to them that in terms of ultimately what happened, she didn't know what was going on, she wasn't told anything, and she was dumbfounded." The court heard that one of the passengers in the car claims she heard Fernando tell another passenger she shouldn't have given her a knife. Fernando's solicitor argued it was her first time in custody and that before she was arrested, she cared for five of her seven children. He said that prior to being arrested, Fernando suffered serious mental health issues and had sought help from her GP. Acting Justice Schmidt said she expected to deliver her decision early next week. Fernando's solicitor said she had "some criminal history largely made up of driving offences and more recently, but not too recently, some larcenies, fraud and an affray" and mentioned she was on a community corrections order at the time. Newcastle City police officers have been investigating the alleged murder of Mr Callahan under Strike Force Mannum, backed by the State Crime Command's homicide squad. A SUPREME Court judge has described the fatal stabbing of James Callahan on Beaumont Street last year as a "vicious murder" as one of seven people charged made a bid for bail on Friday. Dianne Fernando, 39, will have to wait until at least next week to find out if she will be let out on bail after Acting Justice Monika Schmidt told the court she needed more time to reflect on arguments put forward. Police allege Fernando was driving one of the vehicles captured on CCTV on the night of the fatal stabbing at Hamilton on November 17, 2024. Crown prosecutor Liam Shaw opposed Fernando's bail bid, calling the alleged murder a "shocking crime". "The Crown hasn't included the footage because it is too distressing to watch," he said. Mr Shaw alleged Fernando moved the car she was driving one to two metres closer to the altercation that took Mr Callahan's life, blocking the street and "providing lighting" to the people stabbing him. "It's not just the provision of the knife; from the beginning to the end, the applicant played a part in this episode," he said. Fernando was arrested after detectives from Newcastle's proactive crime team stopped a car on Albert Street at Lambton just before 1pm on February 4. Her solicitor argued elements of the Crown case were "circumstantial" and that if she was to be refused bail, Fernando could remain in custody until a trial at the end of 2026 or the start of 2027. "What we say in terms of the police case against Fernando is that it is largely based on CCTV of her movements, the use of her mobile phone, her proximity to what happened and something a witness heard that they said she said," he said. "Ms Fernando maintains what she said to the police in a statement provided to them that in terms of ultimately what happened, she didn't know what was going on, she wasn't told anything, and she was dumbfounded." The court heard that one of the passengers in the car claims she heard Fernando tell another passenger she shouldn't have given her a knife. Fernando's solicitor argued it was her first time in custody and that before she was arrested, she cared for five of her seven children. He said that prior to being arrested, Fernando suffered serious mental health issues and had sought help from her GP. Acting Justice Schmidt said she expected to deliver her decision early next week. Fernando's solicitor said she had "some criminal history largely made up of driving offences and more recently, but not too recently, some larcenies, fraud and an affray" and mentioned she was on a community corrections order at the time. Newcastle City police officers have been investigating the alleged murder of Mr Callahan under Strike Force Mannum, backed by the State Crime Command's homicide squad. A SUPREME Court judge has described the fatal stabbing of James Callahan on Beaumont Street last year as a "vicious murder" as one of seven people charged made a bid for bail on Friday. Dianne Fernando, 39, will have to wait until at least next week to find out if she will be let out on bail after Acting Justice Monika Schmidt told the court she needed more time to reflect on arguments put forward. Police allege Fernando was driving one of the vehicles captured on CCTV on the night of the fatal stabbing at Hamilton on November 17, 2024. Crown prosecutor Liam Shaw opposed Fernando's bail bid, calling the alleged murder a "shocking crime". "The Crown hasn't included the footage because it is too distressing to watch," he said. Mr Shaw alleged Fernando moved the car she was driving one to two metres closer to the altercation that took Mr Callahan's life, blocking the street and "providing lighting" to the people stabbing him. "It's not just the provision of the knife; from the beginning to the end, the applicant played a part in this episode," he said. Fernando was arrested after detectives from Newcastle's proactive crime team stopped a car on Albert Street at Lambton just before 1pm on February 4. Her solicitor argued elements of the Crown case were "circumstantial" and that if she was to be refused bail, Fernando could remain in custody until a trial at the end of 2026 or the start of 2027. "What we say in terms of the police case against Fernando is that it is largely based on CCTV of her movements, the use of her mobile phone, her proximity to what happened and something a witness heard that they said she said," he said. "Ms Fernando maintains what she said to the police in a statement provided to them that in terms of ultimately what happened, she didn't know what was going on, she wasn't told anything, and she was dumbfounded." The court heard that one of the passengers in the car claims she heard Fernando tell another passenger she shouldn't have given her a knife. Fernando's solicitor argued it was her first time in custody and that before she was arrested, she cared for five of her seven children. He said that prior to being arrested, Fernando suffered serious mental health issues and had sought help from her GP. Acting Justice Schmidt said she expected to deliver her decision early next week. Fernando's solicitor said she had "some criminal history largely made up of driving offences and more recently, but not too recently, some larcenies, fraud and an affray" and mentioned she was on a community corrections order at the time. Newcastle City police officers have been investigating the alleged murder of Mr Callahan under Strike Force Mannum, backed by the State Crime Command's homicide squad.