Drug Courts — A Departure from Adversarial Justice

Freiberg Arie , ‘Australian Drug Courts’ (2000) 24 Criminal Law Journal 213, p.219.

Freiberg Arie , ‘Drug courts: Sentencing responses to drug use and drug-related crime’ (2002) 7 Alternative Law Journal 284.

Belenko Steven , Research on Drug Courts: A Critical Review, The Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, June 1998, p.13; Swain Marie , The Illicit Drug Problem: Drug Courts and Other Alternative Approaches, Briefing Paper No 4/99, NSW Parliamentary Library Research Service, p.35.

Freiberg , above, ref 2, p.285.

Swain , above, ref 3, p.35.

Freiberg , above, ref 1, pp.220–21.

Freiberg , above, ref 1, p.221.

See Freiberg , above, ref 1, p.231, and Popovic J. McLachlan S. , Court Referral Evaluation and Drug Intervention and Treatment (CREDIT), paper presented at the Australian Drug Court Workshop, Department of Criminology, the University of Melbourne, February 2000.

Tauber Jeffery , American Drug Courts: A Common Sense Approach to the Drug-using Offender, paper given at the Australasian Conference on Drug Strategy in Adelaide on the 27th of April 1999. Tauber is an American drug court judge and a member of the American National Association of Drug Court Professionals.

Makkai Toni , ‘Drug Courts: Issues and Prospects’, Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, No. 95, Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra, 1998, pp.3 and 7.

See Freiberg , above, ref 1, p.231. Freiberg also makes the point that this can bring a drug court into disfavour when replacement appointments eliminate an earlier trend towards leniency.

Fox Richard Freiberg Arie , Sentencing, State and Federal Law in Victoria, 2nd edn, 1999, p.91; see also Vinson T. Homer R. , ‘Legal Representation and Outcome’ (1973) 47 ALJ 132.

This is all the more so given, as Fox and Freiberg point out (at p.92) that the failure to allow counsel or indeed the defendant to be heard constitutes a reviewable denial of natural justice see Ex parte Kelly; Re Teece [1966] 2 NSWR 674.

Fox Richard , ‘The Compulsion of Voluntary Treatment in Sentencing’ (1996) 16 Crim LJ 37, at 38.

Fox Richard , above, ref 14, pp.44–7.

Fox Richard , above, ref 14, p.39.

Makkai , above, ref 10, p.4.

Fox , above, ref 14, p.39.

Swain , above, ref 3, p.42.

Fox Richard , Victorian Criminal Procedure, State and Federal Law, Monash Law Book Co-op Ltd, Melbourne, 2000, p.79.