Two Victorian teenagers charged with murder have refused to board the prison van to attend court, leaving a magistrate and prosecutors frustrated.<\/p>\n
The pair were arrested after the deaths of Dau Akueng, 15, and Chol Achiek, 12, who were allegedly stabbed to death in Melbourne’s west last month.<\/p>\n
In total, eight people have been charged with murder, with five under the age of 18.<\/p>\n
The five underage accused were due to face a Children’s Court on Friday.<\/p>\n
Three had their cases administratively adjourned, however a court order was put in place requiring the state’s youth justice department to ensure the other two \u2014 a 16-year-old and 15-year-old \u2014 attended in-person.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors had intended to make an application for compulsory DNA samples from the boys, which required them to be in the courtroom.<\/p>\n
When the case was called shortly after 10am on Friday, lawyers for the pair told the magistrate their clients had refused to board the prison van.<\/p>\n
Unhappy with the situation, the frustrated magistrate summoned a youth justice manager to explain what had occurred.<\/p>\n
“The short of it is they refused,” the manager said.<\/p>\n
“We had other young people to transport to court and the [prison] truck doesn’t tend to wait too much.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Tributes were left for Dau Akueng and Chol Achiek following their deaths.\u00a0 (ABC News: Nate Woodall)<\/p>\n
Case stuck at an ‘impasse’<\/p>\n
The youth justice manager was then cross-examined by a prosecutor, who asked what steps the department took when children refused to go to court.<\/p>\n
“It attempts to motivate and encourage,” the manager replied.<\/p>\n
The manager said he was not aware of any ability of prison officers to use force to bring children to court.<\/p>\n
“We need to find another avenue to bring them to court,” the prosecutor said.<\/p>\n
The magistrate said the case was now stuck at an “impasse” because the youth justice department had failed to comply with the court order.<\/p>\n
“It’s frustrating the administration of justice,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I’m not interested in policy, I’m interested in the black and white letter of the law and its compliance.”<\/p>\n
He said children refusing to attend court was “not an infrequent occurrence”.<\/p>\n
A scenario the magistrate did not want to entertain was to conduct a children’s court hearing at the youth prison itself.<\/p>\n
“We’re not all going out there,” he said.<\/p>\n
The matter was adjourned until next Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The case is still in its early stages. It will eventually be determined in Victoria’s Supreme Court if the accused are ordered to face trial or decide to plead guilty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two Victorian teenagers charged with murder have refused to board the prison van to attend court, leaving a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":162547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[126157,502,107418,87066,1108,48,107419,43,13328,59558,647,126155,9749,44,126156,126158,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-202279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-child-court","tag-children","tag-chol-achiek","tag-cobblebank","tag-court","tag-crime","tag-dau-akueng","tag-headlines","tag-judge","tag-magistrate","tag-melbourne","tag-melbourne-west","tag-murders","tag-news","tag-prosecutor","tag-stabbings","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}