Well then she should have used a reasonable rate plan and only spent $80, instead of using someone else's plan and racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars of their money.
She is a clueless, poor person. I agree she should be punished somehow, but this is a life devastating sentence, especially the $193K. How can you be so draconian?
If we want to follow the law to the letter we don't need judges, something like Watson would be more than adequate (and cheaper).
If Aurora actually paid that 193k, then she should repay them for it. But it's not clear to me from the article that they did, and I can't really imagine that they did. If Aurora never paid that bill, she ought to be liable to Telstra for whatever she can get them to reduce the bill to.
There's no indication that she's clueless or poor. A clueless person probably wouldn't have any use for the insane amount of data she downloaded. And a court probably wouldn't impose a $183,000 fine on a person who was both poor and disabled.
She's on a disability pension, but disability pensions aren't means-tested.
"You are 33 years old. You have one conviction for stealing in 2002. I accept it was probably a relatively minor matter because it was dealt with by way of a fine. Your upbringing was unstable in the extreme. You lived in the streets for most of your teenage years and became involved in drinking alcohol and drug taking. You have been diagnosed with depression and bi-polar disorder. You are socially isolated and spend long periods at home alone and accessing the Internet. You have no family support being largely estranged from parents and siblings. You are in receipt of a disability pension. You have incurred debts and have difficulty managing money. It is doubtful that you will ever repay the money stolen by your use of the card."
Evidently she spends a lot of time on the Internet, so she is not clueless in that sense, but from this description she doesn't sound very educated either.
Strikes me as it shouldn't be a question of if she knew, but rather is several months of Internet access worth nearly $200k?
Taking dspillett's example, if what the victim claimed (and even believed) to be a priceless Stradivarius actually turned out to be a modern mass-produced instrument, it'd be deeply unfair to make the defendant pay as if it were.
She almost certainly knew that she should not be using it. If I stole a priceless Stradivarius would I be punished any differently if in court I claimed to have thought it was just a cheap bit of wood with some strings attached?
The sentence does seem harsh to me too, but generally speaking ignorance is not an acceptable defence espscially when the ignorance is not knowing/caring about the scale of the offence rather than just being ignorant that it is an offence at all.
If I stole a priceless Stradivarius would I be punished any differently if in court I claimed to have thought it was just a cheap bit of wood with some strings attached?
Quite possibly. Intent often matters, e.g. involuntary manslaughter vs murder.
Actually, this is not true (at least in the US... not sure how it translates to other common law countries). Your mistake about the facts doesn't excuse you if you still knew you were committing a crime. (I'm having a hard time finding a concise source, but try googling "strict liability for grading").
As for murder, the penalties there do differ depending on your state of mind, but that's not an issue of mistake (you can't try to third-degree murder someone but mistakenly first-degree murder them).
Not to say I agree with the punishment in this case, though.
I agree you can't try to 3rd-degree murder someone and accidentally 1st-degree murder them, but you can try to non-fatally injure someone and, due to being mistaken about the facts, end up killing them (e.g. because you were mistaken about the effects of a poison you used). In that case, you do indeed get convicted of a lesser crime, if the court/jury believe you.
In the theft and criminal damages context, you could have an analog, though we don't currently, where being judged guilty of one of the more major theft or damages offenses (like "theft over $X") requires an intent to cause that level of theft or damages. If you meant to cause $50 in damages and actually caused $50k, that could be a lesser offense than if you meant to cause $50k in damages. You'd be found guilty of essentially "damage over $X but with intent to only cause damage under $X", the way 3rd-degree murder and manslaughter are lesser offenses due to the lack of intent to cause death, even when there was intent to violently injure non-fatally.
I'm still in law school, so I can't claim expertise yet, but my understanding is that accidentally killing someone while purposefully injuring them would be 1st-degree murder.
When you get excused is if you didn't act purposefully... e.g. if you drive your car recklessly and kill someone you'll be guilty of manslaughter. If you purposefully hit someone with your car you'll be guilty of murder even if you only meant to break a few bones.
that. and if the priceless stradivarius was trhow into the sidewalk like any other cheap violin. i doubt the case would take much the priceless part into consideration
But the SIM card was not just discarded where it could be picked up idly. To get at it a device had to be opened. OK so opening the device to get to the SIM probably wasn't difficult, but neither would be opened a violin case and you would not "accidentally" open the device and be surprised to find a SIM in there...
you are correct. but i was not saying anything about the SIM card theft. i was talking about in which case stealing a stradivarius might have it priceless value ignored by the judge.
A priceless stradivarious is a totally different ballgame than a very easily priced amount of gigabytes of 3G transfer. Some sense of market prices for what she actually used should have weighed in here, but obviously it didn't.
As I said elsewhere, even on Telstra's most data-generous plan they charge $69 a month for the first twelve gigs and fifty bucks a gig after that.
Basically they have a pretty tenuous, very expensive 3G network to serve an enormous sparsely populated area and they really don't want people to use it to download large amounts of data. They're happy to sell you a wired link for that purpose.
If we want to follow the law to the letter we don't need judges, something like Watson would be more than adequate (and cheaper).