AUSTRALIA: ANYTHING TO GO EASY ON MUSLIM RAPISTS

As Tegan Wagner stood outside the NSW Supreme Court last Wednesday surrounded by a media scrum, as she named herself and declared victory over the men who had raped her, the deeper story of her trial was more disturbing. On the other side of the lobby, while Tegan urged other victims to emerge from the shadows of fear and shame and report sexual assault, the mother of the second victim in this case was sobbing. "It's so insulting," she said of the judgement delivered 15 minutes earlier. The sentence was the latest in a slew of judicial insults to rape victims delivered over the past five years as a series of gang rapes worked their way through the legal system.

Six months ago, Tegan told me she expected Justice Peter Hidden to deliver a light sentence in her case because the Pakistani brothers who raped her were already serving long sentences for other rapes. "He's a soft judge," she said. She knew what she was talking about. Last Wednesday, I was sitting with Tegan in the front row of court 13A when, after Justice Hidden had departed, she faced her main tormentor, MSK, and told him, "F--- you!" There was plenty of anger in the court. "I know it was a bit immature," she said later, "but I've had to shut up for four years ... That felt good."

For four years a legal circus merely exacerbated these crimes. Finally, Justice Hidden sentenced the ringleader, MSK, to eight years for raping Tegan, and to seven years for raping Cassie Hamim. But for these two crimes he fixed a non-parole period of only 5 years. He sentenced another brother, MAK, to only an additional two years without parole for raping Tegan. The judge knew only a portion of the truth. The full story was never examined by the courts. It showed in Hidden's judgement - in effect, 2 years for each rape. While the judge took into account the 22-year sentences (16 years without parole) the brothers were already serving for two other rapes, he had no right to hide behind the sentences imposed in the earlier trial.

This was the latest in a string of recent cases where judges have treated rape victims as cannon fodder. It is worth recalling the worst excesses because they help explain why only one in 10 of the 7000 sexual and indecent assault incidents reported to NSW Police each year results in someone being found guilty in court.

2001: After three men pleaded guilty in the District Court to raping two 16-year-old girls in 2000, Judge Megan Latham imposed sentences which included a non-parole period of just four years, and claimed these were not race crimes (the accused were Lebanese Muslims, the complainants non-Muslim) even though the victims had said the opposite. On appeal by the Crown, the Court of Criminal Appeal found the sentences "manifestly inadequate".

2001: A gang-rape case involving five men was broken into two trials by the Court of Criminal Appeal over the objections of the prosecution and the orders of the trial judge. The victim was thus required to go to trial twice. The separation mired the second trial in technicalities unresolved to this day.

2003: The first of the K brothers gang-rape trials, involving five accused, was also broken into two trials over the objections of the Crown, again placing a double burden on the two victims. Predictably, in the second trial one of the victims broke down and refused to go to court.

2003: A mistrial was declared in a gang-rape case after a jury had found the accused guilty, because the appeal court did not like the way the judge or the Crown had interpreted a brief conversation. For this, the victim had to go to trial twice.

2004: A gang-rape case in the District Court was jeopardised when Judge G.J. Graham ruled that the victim's correct identification of her attacker from a photo line-up was inadmissible because the accused had not been told by police that the photo taken during questioning could be used in a photo ID session. He also said that posing for the photo could be interpreted by a jury as a tacit admission of guilt. There had to be an appeal against this ludicrous ruling before a trial could proceed. The appeal was successful.

2004: A mistrial was declared after a jury found an accused gang rapist guilty because the Court of Criminal Appeal speculated that jurors were incapable of not being be influenced by publicity surrounding another, proximate gang-rape trial.

2004: A gang-rape case involving two men found guilty by a jury was declared a mistrial by the Court of Criminal Appeal because it was later found that two jurors had inspected the crime scene. The victim was too traumatised to endure another trial. So the two men escaped punishment for these rapes and there was a widely publicised miscarriage of justice in the name of protecting the integrity of the courts.

2005: The trials involving the rapes of Tegan and Cassie were delayed for more than a year by a campaign of manipulation and delay by MSK and MAK designed to wear down the victims.

2006: Justice Hidden lowered the bar for gang-rape sentences even further.

Every one of these instances worked against the interests of the victims. Every case involved Muslim defendants and non-Muslim complainants, thus compounding alleged sex crimes with hate crimes. These cases represent the apex of thousands of instances of sexual harassment, or worse, in Sydney. There must be an appeal against Justice Hidden's sentences or they will make a mockery of Tegan Wagner's calls for women to come forward and trust the same courts that delivered her such rough, slow justice.

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