Several news organisations have launched a legal bid to reveal the identities of two lawyers for the director of public prosecutions in New South Wales, including one accused of mishandling Man Haron Monis’s bail application.
A coroner’s inquest into the Sydney siege has heard one of the solicitors, who appeared in a bail hearing for the gunman in December 2013, was “insufficiently prepared” for his court appearances and failed to present crucial evidence.
An expert bail panel found another bail hearing, run by the other solicitor in October 2014, “could have been handled differently”.
The media organisations, including the ABC, News Corp, Fairfax and the Nine and Seven networks, made the submission after the close of Tuesday’s public hearings.
Dauid Sibtain, for the news outlets, said there was “no basis” for keeping the identities of the pair secret.
The continued suppression of the solicitors’ identities, ostensibly to avoid the risk they be defamed, would need to be “founded upon something far more substantial, and I await to see what that is”.
The coroner, Michael Barnes, will hear the matter on Wednesday morning.
Also on Tuesday, a US terrorism expert, Bruce Hoffman, told the inquest there was “overwhelming” evidence the siege was a terrorist attack.
“From the evidence I was provided I believe and concluded that Mr Monis did have a political motive,” he said, citing Monis’s request for an Islamic State (Isis) flag and attempts to reach a wider audience by forcing hostages to broadcast his demands.
“[The siege] was designed to have far-reaching psychological repercussions beyond the immediate victims,” he said.
Monis’s narcissism and poor mental health was “immaterial”.
“I would still have confidence in characterising him as a radicalised terrorist,” he said.
Other experts commissioned by the inquest have disagreed, including Associate Prof Rodger Shanahan, who has argued the siege was “not motivated by political, ideological or religious causes, but rather was someone with mental health issues acting on his own personal grudges”.
The DPP solicitor who handled Monis’s December 2013 bail hearing continued to defend his handling of the case on Tuesday.
The inquest has previously heard the lawyer destroyed files relating to the matter in November 2014. The solicitor said on Tuesday docments were routinely “culled” by DPP officers.
“I needed some more shelf space – I was doing some spring cleaning,” the solicitor said.
The inquest has also heard the lawyer misinformed the magistrate overseeing Monis’s bail application, claiming the law was “neutral” as to whether the gunman – then facing charges of being an accessory to murder – should be bailed.
Gabrielle Bashir SC, acting for the family of Tori Johnson, who was killed in the siege, has said the law, in fact, required “exceptional circumstances” for Monis to be freed.
But the solicitor said this higher test would have made little difference to the magistrate’s decision to release Monis.
“Even if an exceptional circumstances test could be applied to the evidence in the case of Mr Monis, that test would have been met,” the solicitor said.
The inquest continues.
