At 2 am on January 7, Evie Amiti, a 26 year old Transgender woman who used to be a drummer in a band walked into a Sydney 7-Eleven with a two kilogram axe on her shoulder and a 18 cm kitchen knife tucked into the back pocket of her jeans.
She circled the merchandise once and stopped behind the two other customers. One was a man buying a meat pie after a night out and the other a woman in need of coffee before catching an early flight. Without warning she swung the axe and hit the man in the face, caving in his nasal cavity and sending him to the floor in a flood of blood. Then she hit the woman on the back of the head, fracturing her skull. Prior to her trip to the 7-Eleven she had posted a rant on Facebook declaring " Humans are only able to destroy, to hate - and that is what I will do ".
That might have ended very differently. Had the police arrived before her exit they would have demanded she drop the axe and the knife and if she refused and they felt threatened they would have shot her dead. Police are trained to shoot to kill, not to wound.
When the police did arrive they tracked her to her home and arrested her. She was charged with " wounding with intent to murder " and this week a jury of eight men and four women found her guilty. She had defended the charge on the grounds that she was mentally ill and that her mental illness was accelerated by drugs and alcohol. In September, a judge will hand down the sentence that she will serve for this crime.
This was an unprovoked and heinous crime. A man will need his face rebuilt and have a degree of disfiguration and the woman spent a long time in hospital and missed her flight. The decision made by those jurors ensures that this crime will result in a prison sentence and while in jail the offender will be under medical supervision, and the warders will ensure that she takes whatever anti-psychotic drugs that are prescribed.
She will probably be a model prisoner, and that will be taken into account by the parole board. It is likely that in a very few years she is back on the streets of Sydney, and there is no guarantee she will continue to take the medication that ensures the publics safety. Had the jurors accepted that insanity defence she would have been placed under medical supervision - and in todays world that means sent to the secure ward of a public hospital.
That would probably mean quicker release than from jail. Hospitals are busy places with pressure to recycle beds. Anti-psychotic drugs quickly bring stability, but that problem of continuing medication after release seems to be a predictable cause of continuing crime by the same offenders.
We are seeing medical miracles from the drug industry and one aspect has been the development of slow release medication that can be implanted. It would be helpful if anti-psychotic drugs could be adapted to this form. That could deliver an interesting option for judges to deliver when pondering sentencing.
In some instances there would be a need for such drugs to be administered for life, and that would be included in release options. Failure to report for slow release renewal would bring an arrest order and hospital presentation for that to occur. It seems quite obvious that relying on the mentally impaired to continue taking stabilizing medication is simply putting the public at risk !
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