THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Is the chief justice of the Australian Capital Territory a crusading reformer or a judge? Time to pick one, Lucy McCallum

Is the chief justice of the Australian Capital Territory a crusading reformer or a judge? Time to pick one, Lucy McCallum

This is all about rape victims. Rape is a heavily penalized crime so false rape allegations have to be rigorously tested for. But testing that can be hard on real victims.

Feminists want a way around that but there is none. Telling Leftists that some problem cannot be solved is however alien to thems so they keep trying to solve it, usually by creating more and often bigger problems

It’s one thing to try to reduce delays for sexual assault trials. But when a Chief Justice says ‘there’s an intractable problem in that our overriding task and function is to ensure an accused person has a fair trial’, you had better believe it.

The intractable problem is that the ACT’s most senior judge Lucy McCallum may well have put herself on a collision course, not just with senior barristers, but potentially with the separation of powers.

Our liberal democracy is built around the clear separation of powers. The government and the legislature make the laws. Judges apply the law. Judges do not make the law and should not interpret or administer it in a way that in substance changes the law.

No wonder lawyers in the ACT are in revolt. McCallum, they say, has given the impression to many people, especially lawyers, that she can hold down two roles: that of a chief justice of the Supreme Court, and that of a law reformer.

When a judge signals that she wants changes to how sexual assault cases are conducted in such a way as to correct some “imbalance”, some lawyers in the ACT believe there is a significant risk she’s entering the political realm.

If law reform is where her passion lies, it would be far better for the criminal justice system if she joined an advocacy group, or put herself forward to parliament.

This collision course between the Chief Justice and lawyers could have profound consequences one way or the other, not just for people accused of sexual assault, and their defence lawyers. If judges, of all people, appear to step into the political arena by suggesting that a fair trial is an intractable problem, then we could all be in trouble.

A fair trial is not a problem, let alone an intractable one. A fair trial is the principle that underpins our justice system. Without it, we may as well get rid of courts – and judges – and pack an accused directly off to jail on the basis of an untested allegation.

McCallum’s other comments are equally troubling. She said that the unfortunate message for sexual assault complainant – given the presumption of innocence afforded to an accused person – is that “We are entitled to think you might be lying until you prove that you’re not.

“That’s not quite how the system works but that’s the messaging,” she said.

What garbled nonsense from the territory’s most senior judge.

Of course, a complainant does not have to prove they are telling the truth. They are not a party to a criminal action. They are a witness giving evidence, as in any other trial. It is up to a prosecution to prove that a witness claiming they were raped is telling the truth.

If McCallum is suggesting that a jury is not entitled to think that a complainant might be lying, she is on a collision course with the presumption of innocence. This fundamental principle means that the prosecution bears the burden of proof, meaning that they must prove that a complainant who alleges rape is not lying. In other words, a jury may well find that a complainant is lying.

McCallum has put lawyers, and people accused of sexual assault, in a dreadful position. When they appear in court in front of McCallum, what are they to think after her public comments? Are they to wonder whether the Chief Justice is favour of a fair trial or not? She said a fair trial was “immutable” but she also described a fair trial afforded to an accused as an intractable problem.

Does McCallum believe in the presumption of innocence? Does she understand how these fundamental principles work?

Lawyers are also troubled by the way McCallum described a judge’s duty to disallow “annoying, harassing, humiliating or repetitive” questions, without including the critical qualifier of “unduly” found in the Evidence Act. Does McCallum intend to run cross examinations in her courtroom in accordance with the Evidence Act, or rather as if subject to her own personal amendment to the Act?

Lawyers who express concerns about McCallum’s public foray face another problem. She will know they disagree with her. How will that play out in court? It may have no impact at all, but the fact that senior lawyers are asking these questions shows how inappropriate it is for McCallum to make these comments at all.

Leave it to others to explore law reform. They don’t hold a position of power over an accused, and their lawyers, in a courtroom. That’s why we have the separation of powers, to stop the abuse of power, and the perception of powers being abused.

Given her troubling and muddled comments to a local newspaper, if McCallum was misquoted, she needs to tell us. If she didn’t explain herself as best as she might have, she had better do that.

This debacle shows why judges should stick to their day job, behind the bench, overseeing trials rather than giving the impression that they would rather be law reformers.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/is-the-act-chief-justice-a-crusading-reformer-or-a-judge-time-to-pick-one-lucy-mccallum/news-story/39454e252f32c6908ea5c5ac2da902a3

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Is the chief justice of the Australian Capital Territory a crusading reformer or a judge? Time to pick one, Lucy McCallum

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