I’m fascinated by cases where people are forced to cough up their ill-gotten gains (in my field, we call it ‘disgorgement’). Now, as I’ve noted on the recent David Hicks post, most of the cases involve ex-spies or something of that sort. Heath G has alerted me to a case which is a little out of the ordinary:
Queensland Attorney-General Cameron Dick says he will assess if a woman convicted of feeding dingoes on Fraser Island, off the state’s south-east, has breached proceeds of crime laws when her book is finished.
Earlier this month, Jennifer Parkhurst was given a nine-month suspended sentence and fined $40,000 for feeding 17 dingoes over a 13-month period.
She says she is writing a book about her trial and her experiences on the island.
Mr Dick says people are entitled to express their views about the justice system.
“We don’t want to be seen to be gagging people if they have a view to express about the justice system, but where their criminal activities result in ill-gained money or improperly gathered money or other proceeds of crime, then that’s the real focus of the law, not on minor offences,” he said.
“I’d have to see the book and be satisfied that it won’t breach the law.
“Really the focus of the law is on serious and major crime and not on people telling their story about what experience they may have had in the justice system.
“We do live in a free society where people can express their own views about the justice system.”
On the face of it, I wouldn’t have thought that there was enough in the issue to write a whole book about it. However, while researching this post, I learned that the dingo is a controversial animal. Although dingos have some different behaviour and attributes to normal dogs, it is supremely difficult (if not impossible) to isolate genetic differences, and most dingos these days are hybridised with domestic dogs. They do seem to be a little wilder than standard domestic dogs. There are instances of dingos attacking people, including the infamous case involving the death of 9-week-old baby Azaria Chamberlain at Ayers’ Rock.
Related to this last observation, there were apparently a number of dingo attacks on Fraser Island in 2009. In the wake of Ms Parkhurst’s sentencing, authorities linked the rise in attacks on people with the rise in people like Ms Parkhurst feeding the dingos. Ms Parkhurst (who has a website here) denies this.
I have no idea whether feeding dingos increases their aggression to humans — but if there’s a risk that this might occur, it’s probably best to punish people who do it, even if the people have the best of motives. Still, it seems to me that if the Queensland government is thinking about using proceeds of crime legislation to force this woman to disgorge any profits from her proposed book, this is pretty heavy-handed and punitive. She has already been fined a substantial sum of money and adequately punished, from my point of view. I think it looks bad if we don’t take money off David Hicks or Chopper Read (they are hard targets for a variety of reasons), but we do take money off this woman (she’s an easy target).
(Yes, you can construe from this post that the exam marking has finished, apart from standardization. I’m a happy little Eagle.)
