His
barrister, Felicity Hampel, argued the court should throw out 47 of
the 48 charges against her client on jurisdictional grounds. All but
one charge--breaking into the CSIRO machine in order to steal
Zardoz--related to hacking activities outside Australia. How could an
Australian court claim jurisdiction over a hacked computer in Texas?
Privately, Phoenix worried more about being extradited to the US than
dealing with the Australian courts, but publicly he was going into the
committal with all guns blazing. It was a test case in many ways; not
only the first major hacking case in Australia but also the first time
a hacker had fought Australian committal proceedings for computer
crimes.
The prosecution agreed to drop one of the 48 counts, noting it was a
duplicate charge, but the backdown was a pyrrhic victory for Phoenix.
After a two-day committal hearing, Magistrate John Wilkinson decided
Hampel's jurisdictional argument didn't hold water and on 14 August
1991 he committed Phoenix to stand trial in the County Court.
By the day of Electron's committal, in March, Electron's father had
begun his final decline. The bowel cancer created a roller-coaster of
good and bad days, but soon there were only bad days, and they were
getting worse.
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