Soft Justice

The offence is punishable by a maximum of life in jail and the magistrate, Deborah Sweeney, called it "one of the most serious [to] come before the court".

But Sweeney still granted bail to two men charged with aggravated sexual assault in company.

Why not? Australia has a history of granting bail to sex criminals and can boast of being responsible for the torture and murders of at least seven young women in the United States after freeing Christopher Wilder.

Despite Wilder's previous conviction as a teenager for involvement in a Sydney gang rape and other sex crime arrests subsequent to his migration to the US, he was nonetheless released on (an admittedly large) bail in Australia in 1982 after:

"... grabbing two fifteen-year-old girls from a beach and forcing them to pose without clothes for photographs. Cartel says that he bound them into subservient positions and masturbated over them... His parents posted his substantial bail and he was allowed to return to Florida until his trial, set five months away. Then it was postponed, and postponed again, and by the time his hearings were finally scheduled for April of 1984, he wasn't an easy man to find. Had even one of these judges understood the danger of this sexual predator, he might have been stopped before so many girls died." - CrimeLibrary.com

Quite.

-- Nick