An appeal by ACT director of Public Prosecutions, Victoria Engel, SC, has been dismissed by a Full Bench of the ACT Court of Appeal after only three minutes of deliberation.

A repost from 7 November 2025

The most senior judge, Justice Robert Bromwich, said of the director’s submissions, “Never have I seen an appeal of this nature with such a paucity of reasoning.”

The appeal was against a sentence imposed on a sex offender by Justice Belinda Baker of the ACT Supreme Court. Justice Louise Taylor and Acting Justice Andrew Muller completed the Full Bench of the Court of Appeal.

Such searing condemnation of the director’s submissions, delivered directly in Court, is set to solidify the view being expressed increasingly in the Canberra legal community that the director is pursuing unworthy prosecutions and appeals.

Engel produced 27 pages of submissions, of which Justice Bromwich said only 2½ were “operative”. And, of that fraction, half a page had been devoted to quoting a well-known High Court authority on totality.

The director had relied on another well-thumbed authority in relation to maximum penalties, saying the five individual sentences imposed had been unreasonable and plainly unjust: “It is also submitted that the degree of concurrency between sentences is excessive, such that the total effective sentence is manifestly inadequate.”

Justice Bromwich said of the director’s contentions: “Never have I heard of a practitioner tallying up the sentences and saying it’s not enough.

“That’s the American way. We don’t do that in this country.”

The test for the director’s appeal to succeed was a finding of “manifest........

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