A 14-year-old north Queensland boy with a severe intellectual disability was wrongly convicted and sentenced to nine months’ detention by a magistrate who recorded guilty pleas to a series of charges, despite the child being incapable of instructing his lawyers and not verbalising a plea in court.
The boy – who has an IQ of 54 – spent 136 days in custody in 2023 and was convicted of 19 offences, mostly related to breaking and entering properties.
The convictions were overturned by the Queensland district court judge Ian Dearden, who published a judgment last week ruling that the sentencing children’s court magistrate “could not have been satisfied” the boy understood the charges.
When the child appeared before the court in Atherton on three occasions – in July and September 2023 and March this year – his solicitor indicated he would plead guilty to charges.
On the first occasion, the 14-year-old was “not asked to confirm any of the pleas; the learned magistrate did not particularise any of the offences; [and] no parent or guardian was present”, Dearden found.
At the next hearing, the magistrate “read the short title of the offences and did not read the full charge, location or dates”. When asked to plead, the boy responded: “Yeah.”
In March this year the magistrate “simply described the charges as criminal offences without particularising any of them”.
Again, the boy’s response was “yeah” rather than a plea of guilty or not guilty.
He was categorised as a “serious repeat offender” – a designation under Queensland law that triggers more punitive sentencing principles.
A psychologist’s report, conducted after the hearings, found the boy was unfit to stand trial. It noted that the boy had previously been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and had provisional diagnoses of oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder.
The report said the boy had “failed” components of the Presser test, particularly related to his ability to understand the court proceedings and instruct his lawyers.
“It is clear in my view that the court should have been aware of, and the learned magistrate was certainly alerted to, the intellectual challenges that the [boy] faced,” Dearden said in his judgment.
“A far more cautious approach was appropriate in the circumstances. The [boy], of course, was at the time a 14 and 15-year-old child, and as the material has previously identified, with the intellectual capacity of a child of approximately eight years.”
Dearden said the boy “literally did not enter a plea of guilty” and that there had been “a lack of compliance with Justices Act s. 145” during the initial hearings.
“The appellant submits and I accept … that the entering of pleas on the above occasions involved irregularities to the point of making the convictions in each case a nullity.”
The boy served 136 days in pre-sentence custody. He was sentenced to nine months in detention, including six months that would be served by a “conditional release order” that made him subject to a curfew between 7pm and 7am.
The verdict and orders, including the serious repeat offender declaration, were overturned and the case was remitted back to the children’s court, to be heard by a different magistrate.
This story was amended on 17 December 2024. A previous version incorrectly stated the boy had appeared before the Kuranda magistrate court. It was the Atherton magistrates court.
