Douglas Flemons' The Heart and Mind of Hypnotherapy: Inviting Connection, Inventing Change provides a roadmap of the practice of relational hypnotherapy. The book combines theoretical knowledge with both self-guided experiential activities and transcripts of case illustrations to illuminate key concepts and bring the practice to life. The authors pay particular attention to Flemons' discussion of the concepts of empathy and utilization as tools for novice therapists and seasoned clinicians alike to incorporate into their practice. Flemons' book is accessible to MFTs or anyone seeking to practice hypnotherapy through a relationally-informed lens or with a systemic sensibility.

A plea of guilty is a long-accepted factor mitigating sentence in many countries, including Australia, although academic debate over the merits and application of the discount is ongoing. This paper presents findings from a national Australian study on public opinion on the guilty plea sentencing discount, with a particular focus on sexual offences. Survey data were drawn from 989 jurors in cases that resulted in a guilty verdict and 450 unempanelled jurors and 306 online respondents who were provided with vignettes based on real cases. A third of the respondents would have supported a discount in their case if the offender had pleaded guilty. In contrast, more than one half of the respondents surveyed, who had received a vignette with a guilty plea scenario, supported an increment in sentence if the offender had gone to trial. There was more support for a discount in cases involving non-sexual violent offences versus sexual offences and adult versus child victims. Where a discount was supported, this most commonly was a reduction in the length of custodial sentence, with online respondents allocating the least generous discounts. Willingness to accept a sentencing discount was predicted by a range of variables including gender, education, punitive attitudes, offence type and offence seriousness. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for sentencing law and practice.

On Monday, 15 February 2021, the Royal Society of Tasmania (RST) and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) delivered paired Apologies to the Aboriginal people of Tasmania. The event was held in the Courtyard of TMAG, Hobart, and attended in person by about one hundred invited guests including members of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, members of the Council of the RST and members of the Board of Trustees of TMAG. A large number of invited guests also witnessed the event by livestream. It was also the first time the Aboriginal flag had been flown at Customs House to commemorate the significance of this event.

There is an expanding body of research measuring public perceptions of the criminal justice system's responses to offenders in general and sex offenders in particular. However, less is known about public attitudes to the factors that the law classifies as aggravating, mitigating or merely neutral. This article presents key findings from the National Jury Sentencing Study, which sought to address this gap in knowledge in the case of sex offences using two groups: 343 jurors who had returned a guilty verdict; and 149 members of the public called for jury service who were not selected for a trial. The study shows that, in general, the public's intuitive views of sentencing factors are well-aligned with judicial sentencing practice - a finding that contradicts the stereotypical view of the public as particularly punitive towards sex offenders. Some differences in views on factors such as good character and absence of remorse did appear and potential responses to this divergence are discussed.

In their sentencing remarks, judges aspire to make their reasoning accessible and to appropriately acknowledge victim impact. This article reports on the findings of the National Jury Sentencing Study in relation to the views of empanelled and unempanelled jurors about judges' sentencing remarks in a sample of sex and other violent offence cases. It found that most respondents endorsed the clarity and persuasiveness of the judges' reasons and there was a relationship between perceptions of the appropriateness of the sentence and the clarity and persuasiveness of reasons. However, there was less agreement in relation to questions about victim impact, perceived victim vindication and balancing victim and offender issues, with significant differences between empanelled and unempanelled jurors. It is argued that making sentencing remarks more accessible to jurors and the general public has the potential to improve public confidence in sentencing generally particularly in sex offence cases, where it is most lacking.

This article reports on the findings of a content analysis of judges' sentencing remarks for 167 offenders from 159 trials. The results show the wide range of aggravating and mitigating factors considered by judges in sentencing sexual and non-sexual violent offences and identifies those factors that arise most frequently. The article sheds light on the sentencing practice of judges at first instance, which complements the understanding of sentencing practice derived from legislative and appellate guidance. In the interests of improving public understanding of sentencing practices, factors that would benefit from better explanation in sentencing remarks are highlighted. Factors that require clearer appellate guidance are also noted and some interesting jurisdictional differences in the treatment of some factors are discussed.

Distinguished Professor Don Chalmers retired from the Law Faculty at the University of Tasmania on Friday 10 July 2020. This article is dedicated to Don, providing a brief account and acknowledgment of his fine contributions to legal research and education and law reform, particularly in the field of health and medical law, research ethics and policy reform. He has been an excellent colleague, mentor, leader, teacher, and researcher. He deserves to enjoy a long and rewarding retirement, though we, and many others, will not allow him to slip entirely out of the limelight. Don is still much needed, and still has so much to give in our ongoing quest to ensure that legal, research ethics and policy responses are adequate in reaping the benefits and responding to the challenges of biomedical advances.

This article presents data from questions about sex offender registration orders in a large national survey on Australian public opinion about adult sex offenders. It outlines the legislative frameworks that govern these registers in Australia and discusses the use of public registers, the research on the effectiveness of sex offender registers, and Australian attitudes to such registers. Our surveys of three cohorts of members of the Australian public reveal strong public support for sex offender registers, especially for cases involving child victims. However, there was also support for judicial discretion in the imposition of orders and reduced support for automatic registration where a non-custodial sentence is imposed. The Australian Government has recently announced the establishment of a national public sex offender register, but our findings show limited support for this approach. The implications for policy and practice are considered.

Part of the book Mobilising International Law for “Global Justice” (edited by Jeff Handmaker and Karin Arts, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press), this chapter argues that the very first situation before the International Criminal Court is illustrative of how the globalisation of international criminal justice amplifies some voices while silencing others. The chapter shows how in northern Uganda the globalisation of criminal justice offered a site for what Martti Koskenniemi has called ‘the politics of re-description’ and we give four examples: (1) the struggle between a military approach and reconciliation efforts in the period prior to ICC intervention; (2) the ICC referral as a way to re-describe the conflict and to continue a military approach; (3) the Juba peace process as a negotiation between legal and other approaches and (4) the post-Juba period, in which a political agreement is approached legalistically.

In recent times, parliaments have introduced legislation directing judges to take defined purposes into account when sentencing. At the same time, judges and politicians also acknowledge that sentencing should vindicate the values of the community. This article compares the views on the purposes of sentencing of three major participants in the criminal justice system: legislators who pass sentencing statutes, judges who impose and justify sentences and jurors who represent the community. A total of 987 Australian jurors in the Victorian Jury Sentencing Study (2013–2015) were asked to sentence the offender in their trial and to choose the purpose that best justified the sentence. The judges’ sentencing remarks were coded and the results were compared with the jurors’ surveys. The research shows that, in this jurisdiction, the views of the judges, the jurors and the legislators are not always well aligned. Judges relied on general deterrence much more than jurors and jurors selected incapacitation as the primary purpose in only about a fifth of ‘serious offender’ cases where parliament has provided that community protection must be the principal purpose.

This article reports the findings of the first study in Australia to compare the responses of judges and jurors in 122 real cases who were asked to identify the appropriate relevance and weight that should be given to some of the most commonly listed aggravating and mitigating factors in sentencing. The research reveals that, while jurors and judges in Victoria are alike in giving more weight to aggravating factors than mitigating factors and in supporting an individualised approach to sentencing, jurors give less weight than judges to some mitigating factors, including good character, being a first offender, youth, old age and physical illness. Jurors also adopted broader interpretations of aggravating factors like breach of trust and the relevance of prior convictions. They also preferred a different rationale for discounting sentences due to family hardship.

Mental disorder, intellectual disability, intoxication and drug addiction are factors that are often raised in sentencing hearings, but the effect that these four conditions can have on an offender’s sentence is rarely studied. This article fills two gaps in our understanding of the relevance of these ambiguous sentencing factors: first, by analysing how judges in the County Court of Victoria responded to these factors in 122 sentencing cases relating to 140 sentenced offenders; and second, by comparing the views of the judges with those of 426 jurors who had tried those cases and who participated in the Victorian Jury Sentencing Study. It concludes that lay opinion on the relevance of these factors does not always align with judicial practice and discusses the implications of these findings.

The Victorian jury study aimed to ascertain jurors' views of sentencing severity and to compare the views of judges and jurors on the relevance of aggravating and mitigating factors. A surprising finding from the analysis of the sentencing remarks from the trials in the study is that delay was the third most common mitigating factor. This article suggests that because delay's relevance as mitigating factor may be not immediately apparent to the public, the reasons why it attracts a reduced sentence should be clearly explained by sentencers.

In the light of proposals to give jurors a sentencing role in response to media portrayals of judges as soft on crime and out of touch, this article reports on a study which explored jurors' thoughts about such a role using survey questions and interviews. Most shied away from such a role.

When asked about sentencing discretion and mandatory sentences, jurors participating in the Victorian Jury Sentencing Study expressed strong support for sentencing discretion and weak support for mandatory sentences despite a belief by jurors that, in general, sentences are too lenient. This strengthens the argument that polls that pose a general question about mandatory sentences or sentencing severity divorced from the context of a specific case are an inadequate and misleading measure of public opinion.

Despite abundant academic debate about the justification for criminal punishment, the frequent revisiting of how to deal legislatively with the purposes of a sentence by law reform bodies and some legal analysis of appellate guidance on the purposes of sentence, little attention has been given to judges' reliance on the purposes of sentence in their sentencing remarks. This article attempts to close this gap by analysing the sentencing remarks in trials obtained for a study of jurors' views of sentencing in Victoria. Against the backdrop of the Victorian legislation, the article examines the extent to which judges advert to the purposes of sentence in their reasons and how they rank and prioritise the purposes including in cases where there was a statutory requirement to prioritise incapacitation. Explanations for judges' preferences are suggested including that purposes serve as proxies for statements about the seriousness of the crime.

This paper presents the results of the Victorian Jury Sentencing Study which aimed to measure jurors’ views on sentencing. The study asked jurors who had returned a guilty verdict to propose a sentence for the offender, to comment on the sentence given by the judge in their case and to give their opinions on general sentencing levels for different offence types. A total of 987 jurors from 124 criminal trials in the County Court of Victoria participated in this mixed-method and multi-phased study in 2013–2015. The results are based on juror responses to the Stage One and Stage Two surveys and show that the views of judges and jurors are much more closely aligned than mass public opinion surveys would suggest.

The public perception of sex offenders tends to be of predatory stranger rapists and child molesters. A typical child molester is perceived to be the predatory child sex offender who lurks around s...

This article provides a brief overview of a national study commencing in early 2014 which will use jurors from criminal trials to explore public opinions about sentencing. Judges sitting in trials for sex offences and serious violence offences in metropolitan and selected regional courts will be asked to invite jurors to participate in the national study following the return of a guilty verdict in the trial.