It’s official: NT
judges are biased
"I was subject to specious drivel which I dismissed with venom…
yes, I did dismiss it with venom."
Magistrate David Loadman, 14th April 2005
By Rob Inder-Smith (14th April 2005)
Magistrate David Loadman made a stunning admission today – that he was biased against members of the Network Against Prohibition.
His confession was made the more extraordinary because he included his fellow magistrates.
Rarely do they rule themselves out of hearing a charge – which Mr Loadman did - because of their own bias.
Even more rarely do they concede that their “brothers’’ might also have to stand themselves down because they, too, share the same jaundiced views about defendants before them.
As drop-mouthed as we at NAP were following Mr Loadman’s decision, we feel vindicated on yet another judicial front. Since forming more than three years ago, NAP has maintained that charges laid against its members have been either politically motivated, frivolous, vexatious, petty or a combination of all of them. Our belief has been borne out by the fact that in at least 80 instances, NAP either beat the charges, or had them dismissed.
Now, NAP has been seen to be right in another arena – that of entrenched bias. Mr Loadman, in all his haughty arrogance, could not have done the activists a bigger favour.
The prosecution must also be thanked because it was lawyer Tim Smith who said at the outset, that two of the prosecution witnesses in the case against a young person about to be tried, were associated with NAP.
Mr Loadman must have
shuddered. He was expecting a
regulation assault charge – now he had to make a grave decision.
Magistrate David Loadman
Deciding that discretion was the better part of his usual cavalier imperiousness, Mr Loadman decided to quit while he was ahead.
He aborted proceedings in what amounted to a judicial pre-emptive strike. In doing so, he articulated something else that NAP has long suspected – that the NT has run out of magistrates and judges capable of being dispassionate when hearing NAP cases. This is despite the fact that the assault charge was unrelated to NAP’s ongoing hearings.
The South African-born magistrate’s undisguised hatred of the progressive drug law-reform group dates back to December, 2002, when he upheld a charge of assault against Ema Corro. The plaintiff was strapping Darwin security guard Aaron Wigmore, who claimed Corro had assaulted him during the controversial "parliament invasion" of May the same year.
Despite the paucity of proof, Loadman found her guilty and handed down a suspended sentence. He described her legal counsel as “criminally stupid’’.
Comments such as that became the norm as more and more Napatistas were bought before him.
His courtroom denial in September, 2003, that he was personally biased against NAP member Nicolette Burrows - “I refute utterly any suggestion (that I am),” he said – has come back to haunt him.
His personal dislike of the author backfired in the worst, most embarrassing way 16 months later, when a hostile, two-day attack he unleashed while prosecuting two trumped-up charges against me, was later found to have been so obviously biased, that his ruling was swiftly overturned in the Northern Territory Supreme Court.
Justice David Angel upheld my appeal, and NAP was vindicated once more.
It is for this reason, and a welter of others, such as the prospect of more successful Supreme Court appeals, that history will put NAP in a more favourable light than the insular NT judiciary and media.
What is certain in the short term, is that Mr Loadman – who NAP has described as messianic – has felt the acute sting of shame and failure.
