A Canberra mother who was visited at home by a stranger and told to deliver three small balloons of suspected drugs to her son in jail has been found guilty of taking the items into the prison.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The mother said the unknown man threatened her and said if she did not hand her son the drugs during her visit the next day her son would face the consequences.
The woman took that as a threat to harm her son, as she had seen him with a black eye a few weeks earlier and he had told her he'd been knocked out twice.
She believed the only way to keep her son safe was to give him the drugs during the visit.
The woman said she did not report the threat because she thought “they couldn’t keep him safe if I reported it, they couldn’t protect him inside the AMC.”
The woman's lawyers raised the defence of duress, but while Magistrate Karen Fryar found the woman had been threatened as she said, she also found the defence was not made out.
Duress - a defence that is rarely raised - requires that in addition to a threat a person must also believe there is no reasonable way to neutralise the threat.
In this case, the woman was unable to provide any evidence about whether her belief that the authorities could not keep her son safe was reasonable, the magistrate said.
The woman had considered calling police after the threat but concluded that would only exacerbate the threat and the only way to keep her son safe was to deliver the balloons.
She expressed the view that to go to the protection unit in jail is frowned upon and that people who do become a target when they come out.
High Court authority was considered in this case, in which the country's highest court said: "The applicant’s belief that police protection may not be 100 per cent safe provided no basis for a reasoned conclusion that it was not.
"A particularised concern that police protection may not be a guarantee of safety cannot without more supply reasonable grounds for a belief that there is no option other than to break the law in order to escape the execution of a threat.”
Ms Fryar found the defence had not met the burden and provided the necessary evidence, which flipped from the prosecution to the defence when it raised duress.
"The fact that her son had been assaulted in custody was not evidence that if the authorities had known of the threat made to her that proper investigations would not or could not have occurred," Ms Fryar said.
"And appropriate steps would not or could not be taken to render the threat ineffective."
In a decision published on Tuesday, Ms Fryar found the woman guilty of the offence of taking a prohibited item into a correction centre and of giving a prohibited item to a detainee.