Record prisoner numbers following the NT government's tough-on-crime legislation changes are clogging up the territory's courts, leaving lawyers in the dark about what charges their clients are facing. Lawyers say the backlog could impact community safety after a number of remand prisoners were almost released ahead of their first court appearance on Wednesday.
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TVTranscript
00:00From the watch house to the courthouse, the Territory's push to incarcerate a record number
00:07of people is taking its toll.
00:10As we speak, more and more people are being arrested, less and less people are getting
00:13bail from the police watch houses.
00:15Today, inside the busiest courtroom in the Northern Territory, lawyers scrambled to manage
00:2039 in custody matters, eight of those left over from yesterday as the backlog mounts.
00:27On two occasions, defence lawyers telling the court they didn't even know what their
00:31clients had been charged with.
00:33Judge Tanya Fong-Lim saying she would be forced to release those whose paperwork wasn't completed.
00:40If everybody has the right to know what the case against them is, but more broadly, if
00:44we don't know what that person's accused of and they're going to be released at 12 o'clock,
00:48that's not making the community safe.
00:49Two days ago, NT Prisons hit a new record capacity of 2,628 inmates.
00:57Tougher bail laws and new weapons offences known as Declan's Law, which came into force
01:02on Monday, yet another layer to this ever-growing pile of pressures.
01:07It's going to choke up the court system and it's going to lead to injustice.
01:10Today, the Territory's largest Aboriginal legal service, NARJA, reported a record 1,276
01:18notifications of Aboriginal people being taken into custody in December last year.
01:24They also said they were unable to visit 131 people inside the Palmerston Watch House
01:31that same month.
01:32People are being packed in like sardines to a system that's breaking at the seams.
01:37We are seeing a huge increase in demand, but that is the point, that we need to ensure
01:42that we are keeping our community safe.
01:44Specialist Domestic Violence Services warning if people are released prematurely, it's likely
01:50the safety of women and children will be at risk.
01:54If the system isn't currently set up to even hear that matter, it's very unlikely that
01:59the victim survivors, the women and children impacted by that offending, are being advised
02:04of that person's release.
02:06The government sticking to the plan in the face of compounding crises.