When I was fresh out of high school, I used to work as a filing clerk at the Supreme Court of NSW. The job was to deliver the court files to the judges for whatever cases they were hearing that day.
It was a braindead monkey job; once you’d been at it for a while, you could easily get your week’s work done in two or three days. But if you were seen overtly hanging around doing nothing you’d get in trouble, so I used to kill time in the basement reading old court transcripts.
Court cases usually don’t go in a simple linear fashion from trial to judgement. Instead, a judge will hear a bunch of cases, think about them for a while, then have a “judgement day” when they hand down their decisions on all of their pending cases.
I remember reading a pair of judgements, handed down by the same judge on the same day. The first was for a bloke who’d been convicted of a string of sex offences against 7-12 year old girls.
The judgement went on at great length about how the offender was a respected figure in the community, a successful stockbroker who spent his spare time volunteering at the local childcare centre. The judge argued that the damage to his reputation was almost sufficient punishment in itself. In the end, he sentenced him to 6 months minimum, 18 months maximum, with 4 months already served on remand.
The other case that he dealt with was a guy convicted of importing hashish. He got 22 years.
Same judge, same day. TANJ.
