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Vickie Lee Roach: Legal Case Study

431 Words2 Pages

FORMER delinquent and Aborigine, Vickie Lee Roach, was serving a six-year jail term for the 125 convictions she had between 1976 and 2003, from 23 court appearances. At the time of her arrest in 2002, Roach had alcohol, four types of tranquillisers, morphine and a cannabis-related substance in her blood. In an attempt to escape police by driving at a high speed, Roach hit a stationary car, which went up in flames resulting in a suffering of burns up to 45 per cent of the man in the other cars body. Roach had challenged the validity of the 2006 amendments made to the Electoral Act (1918). The amendments prohibited all prisoners from voting in federal elections. Before the amendment only those prisoners serving a sentence of three years or longer were excluded from voting. Roach launched the case in order to protect the violation of her rights. The right in question was the right to vote, which Ms Roach believed was infringed by the amendments to the Electoral Act. …show more content…

In an application filed with the High Court, Roach's legal team sued the Electoral Commission and the Commonwealth Parliament, arguing that her disqualification from voting violated both S7 and S24 of the Australian Constitution’s requirement that parliament is to be “directly chosen by the people” and the Constitution’s right to political freedom of communication. The High Court believed that the complete ban on prisoners voting was unconstitutional, as it was inconsistent with the principles of representative government. This principle requires that members of parliament are elected into government by the people they seek to represent. Sections 7 and 24 of the Constitution require that ‘Senators’ and members of the ‘House of Representatives’ are directly chosen by the people; therefore there is a right to vote, that had been violated by this legislation. Hence the 2006 amendment was declared to be

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How was the right(s) infringed? Vickie Lee Roach was a prisoner whose ability to vote had been taken away by Commonwealth legislation. She argued that the legislation breached her constitutional rights and argued her case in the High Court. Roach’s disqualification from voting violated both the Australian Constitution’s requirement that parliament be “directly chosen by the people”

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