Magistrate Catherine Crawford sues Perth Children’s Court president Hylton Quail over transfer to adult courts

A magistrate is suing a senior judge — the president of Perth Children’s Court — over a decision to move her to the magistrate’s court and deal with adult offenders. In a writ filed in the WA Supreme Court last week, Catherine Crawford, who became a magistrate in 2006, claimed she was appointed by WA’s chief magistrate to sit “exclusively” in the Perth Children’s Court in 2012. But Ms Crawford alleges she had been told by letter last month, and by email on the day she filed the writ, that Perth Children’s Court president Hylton Quail had directed she be transferred back to work in WA’s magistrate’s courts from January 20. Ms Crawford claimed Judge Quail “has no power to preclude the plaintiff from sitting exclusively as a magistrate in the Children’s Court of Western Australia in Perth at the Perth Children’s Court”. “The defendant has no power to direct that the plaintiff be transferred back to the Magistrates Court of Western Australia as a magistrate,” the writ claims. Ms Crawford is seeking a declaration that Judge Quail cannot prevent her from sitting only in the Children’s Court, or to send her to the magistrate’s court. She also wants “an injunction requiring the defendant to do all things necessary to ensure” that she can remain a magistrate in Perth Children’s Court. Ms Crawford, who spent some of her career working in the Kimberley region, has long been outspoken about the justice system’s need to consider foetal alcohol syndrome in sentencing juvenile offenders. “The failure to diagnose FASD in a young person affected by it, involved in the criminal justice system, causes injustice to the individual young person and exposes the family and community to a repetition of that unlawful behaviour,” she wrote during a federal parliament inquiry in 2014. Judge Quail was appointed Perth Children’s Court president last year.