THE GOLFING GROPER

There’s a growing trend in our courts that, I believe, is getting magistrates and judges sucked in. It’s the impassioned plea from defendants’ lawyers for a person who pleads guilty not to have a conviction recorded against them. The argument is that a conviction, especially at a young age, will unfairly affect that person’s life ‘going forward’ – to use that awful current expression. We saw it in the Werribee DVD case and the riot charges against G20 protesters who assaulted Police.‘Your Honour… he’s a fine upstanding young man. He wants to be a lawyer. If you record a conviction against him it will haunt him forever. Destroy his future’.

Forget about the lasting damage that was done to the brutally assaulted young girl in the Werribee case. Or the police woman still suffering physical, career threatening, injuries from her G20 assailants.

There was a classic example played out in Melbourne Magistrate’s Court this week.

It involved golfer Leighton Lyle, a former Australian champion who has just earned professional status.

On a flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne indecently assaulted a female passenger who was sleeping. He admitted he pulled down the defenceless woman’s top and started ‘tugging and pulling’ at her breast.

He pleaded guilty to one charge of committing an indecent act on an aircraft. And this is where the ‘defendant is really the victim’ comes in. Forget the fact that some woman will never again feel comfortable dozing off on plane.

Lyle from Shepparton is 25. A grown man. His lawyer Julie Sutherland made him sound like a sexually repressed teenager.  In her words his ‘psychosexual side has been put in abeyance’ whatever that means.

She told the court Lyle had taken several important steps to stabilize his ‘psychosexual side’. You know what they are? Well, for starters, he’s joined several internet dating services.

That’s a great way for a sexually repressed man to learn more about the real world. Not.

Lawyer Sutherland said his passion was golfing. Obviously, among other things. And then comes the kicker. A criminal conviction would effectively end his career before it began. And she dismissed the sexual assault as a ‘gross lapse in judgment’.

It was more than that. This was a bunker of his own making. And they dragged in forensic psychologist Jeffrey Cummins who said Lyle was sexually immature and naive when he fondled the woman. I would have thought he knew exactly what he was doing.

And Cummins said, a conviction ‘would have a disastrous impact on him in a very broad psychological sense’. Use that as a yardstick and the courts would never convict anybody.

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2008