Judge Suspended After Bizarre Comments That Incest No Longer Taboo, Abortion Makes It Ok

The judge was supposed to be presiding over the fate of a man accused of incest in repeatedly raping his younger sister, but his bizarre comments justifying incest and pedophilia have led to outrage and suspension from hearing any more criminal cases until a full investigation into his comments is completed.

District Court Judge Garry Neilson of Sydney, Australia, recently made a number of disturbing remarks in a case that have caused the attorney general and others to question thejudge’s competency to hear cases, reports the Guardian, calling for his removal from the bench.

The judge said that the community may no longer view incestuous sexual contact between siblings or adults and children as “unnatural” or “taboo,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Neilson cited the changing cultural attitudes toward homosexuality as justification for his position on incest:

“If this was the 50s and you had a jury of 12 men there, which is what you’d invariably have, they would say it’s unnatural for a man to be interested in another man or a man being interested in a boy. Those things have gone.”

Except for the fact that “a man being interested in a boy” sexually is still considered pedophilia, and a crime. And incest and rape are still considered crimes, by most people besides this judge. There are notable exceptions, such as the creepy Nigerian man who married his 14-year-old daughter after his wife died, but as The Inquisitr reported, that man now faces well-deserved charges.

The case over which Judge Neilson was presiding when he revealed his disturbing perspective on incest involves a 58-year-old man, called MRM by the Australian media, who is accused of repeatedly raping his younger sister in 1981 in the family home in Western Sydney, when he was 26 and she was 18.

The accused had earlier confessed to sexually molesting her, reports the Independent, when he was 17 and she was 10 or 11. That admission came after he admitted to the incest in a phone conversation with his sister in July of 2011 that he had sex with her when she was “a kid,” a phone conversation that police recorded and submitted to the judge.

However, the perpetrator denies wrongdoing in the charges relating to the events in 1981, in which he is charged with “sexual intercourse without consent, with an alternative charge of incest.”

When the Crown Prosecutor wanted to have the perpetrator’s admission of guilt in the earlier incestuous assault admitted as evidence to establish prior intent and behavior, Judge Neilson balked. He told the Prosecutor that the two cases were of a different nature entirely, because by 1981, the victim had already had consensual relations with two other men and had a child.

Ignoring the reality that “no means no,” the judge went on a harangue:

“By that stage they are both mature adults. The complainant has been sexually awoken, shall we say, by having two relationships with men and she had become ‘free’ when the second relationship broke down.

“The only thing that might change that is the fact that they were a brother and sister but we’ve come a long way from the 1950s … when the position of the English Common Law was that sex outside marriage was not lawful.”

Judge Neilson’s outlandish comments didn’t stop there. Ignoring any sense of cultural mores or anthropological history, the judge declared that the only reason that incest had previously been frowned upon or criminalized was the fear that any children conceived in an incestuous union would result in “chromosomal abnormalities,” but, reports LifeNews, he continued:

“even that [risk] falls away to an extent [because] there is such ease of contraception and readily access to abortion.”

“These remarks in my submission are completely disgraceful,” Crown Prosecutor Sally Dowling told the Court of Appeals on Tuesday when she petitioned the Court to assign the case to another judge. She reported the judge’s “misogynistic” attitude toward the incest/rape victim, and stated that “the reference to abortion is particularly repellent.”

After the demand that Judge Neilson be removed from the case was granted, and the judge has been blocked from hearing further cases pending an investigation into his comments, the Daily Telegraph unearthed a prior grotesque ruling by the same judge, this time back in 2011.

That case involved a young girl who was 15 and 16 when she was repeatedly raped by her uncle, who was also in an incestuous relationship with his sister, her mother, at the time. Judge Neilson ruled the charge to be in the “mid-range” of severity, based on the fact that the 55-year-old man did not ejaculate inside of his young niece, and there was no “rough handling” of her when she was forced into incestuous sex.

In the judge’s warped mind, his failure to ejaculate in her made the incest and rape somehow all ok. Court records show that he actually said in his ruling that the victim “had not been exposed to the risk of pregnancy or having some sexually transmitted disease,” ignoring basic biology as well as any sense of decency.

Later, in March 2013, an appeal resulted in those comments by the judge being slammed by appeal court justices Lucy McCallum, Monika Schmidt’ and Derek Price: “It is difficult to see how that was a matter which could have been considered to reduce the objective seriousness of this offence in any real way.”

Yet, Judge Garry Neilson was allowed to remain on the bench and given the opportunity to further victimize people who had already been victimized by incest and rape. His unbelievable comments are making headlines around the world, and, for now, the world is outraged. For now, at least, incest is still seen by most of the world, if not this judge, as taboo.

[images via EmergingScholars, Sydney Morning Herald, and BuyToLet]