Re Campbell [2025] VSC 591

• Application for bail by Aboriginal male charged with arson, theft and bail offences
• Considered ‘historical and ongoing discriminatory systemic factors that have resulted in Aboriginal people being over-represented in the criminal justice system, including in the remand population’ and ‘the risk of harm and trauma that being in custody poses to Aboriginal people’ as required by s.3A(1)(a) and (b) Bail Act 1977 (Vic)
• Applicant’s first time in custody and relative youth – evidence custody has had deleterious effect on his mental health – has been a victim of assault in custody:

[84] The evidence before the Court of the applicant’s experience in custody is alarming and a red flag for the potential harm being in custody poses to him.

[85] Even short periods of incarceration, including remand, can have wide-ranging detrimental impacts. There is a real and ‘high risk of harm’ and trauma to the applicant posed by his continued remand by virtue of his ‘Aboriginality alone’: Re Terei [2024] VSC 294 at [60]

[86] …

Aboriginal people continue to die in Victorian prisons at high rates, not because they are more likely to die when in prison compared to other people, but because governments are locking first peoples up at shockingly high rates. Since the [Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody], 34 Aboriginal people have died in custody, 24 in the custody of Corrections Victoria. In the past four years alone, six Aboriginal people have died in the custody of Corrections Victoria … (Yoorrook Justice Commission, Yoorrook for Justice (4 September 2023), 360)