[ad_1]
A former liberal state leader repeatedly used cocaine with friends as a “means of escapism” to deal with the stressful factors of his work, a court has been told.
The former opposition leader, who left Parliament in October 2024, sat on the dock with his hands together in his lap for the 85 -minute audience.
Speirs has been involved in controversy since he resigned from leadership on August 8, stating that “he had just had a leadership speculation” and did not have the energy to continue fighting.
Defensor lawyer William Mickan said that when Speirs became an opposition leader in April 2022, he experienced “acute and immense stress” and “felt extreme pressure while fighting to keep the party aimed.”
He could not participate in his “previous adaptive coping mechanism” of exercise and a third party introduced it to cocaine in June 2024, using it in “several other occasions as a” means of escapism. ”
“I was using cocaine to address its stressful factors, interacting with friends and providing them with cocaine in search of that escapism,” Mickan said.
When reading the declaration of the facts in the case, Judge Brian Nitschke said: “Two friends who had used cocaine were previously aware of the invitation in social networks that could be available as part of his catch up with Mr. Speirs.”
The director of public prosecutions, Martin Hinton KC, said that when a member of the Parliament is carried out “in a totally inconsistent way with what is his public duty, he undermines the own fabric or purpose of the Parliament and what it represents, and the public confidence that we compromise in the parliamentarians.”
“There is an element of hypocrisy when entering this court and saying ‘do not apply those laws,” he said.
The crimes occurred in the suburb of Adelaide of the Kingston Park on August 1 and between August 1 and 10.
Speirs had taken drugs “in a safe environment with his friends, or I think his supposed friends, where the operation of stressful factors in his mind was perhaps something distant in terms of his immediate pressure in his mind,” said Hinton.
The offense was “an aberration of character” in the lowest seriousness range and Speirs was “otherwise exemplary” and had made significant contributions to SA, Mickan said.
“He feels that he has betrayed his friends and family, as well as the general public. And he has had to explain to his parents his behavior,” he said.
Speirs had voluntarily underwent the drug tests that returned the negative results and their rehabilitation perspectives were good, Mickan said.
He asked that a fine or good behavior link be imposed and no conviction will be recorded. But Hinton sought a conviction against Speirs and a “significant” fine.
Nitschke said he had seen media where Speirs had been the target of “what could be said to be humor.”
“That would be humiliating for a person who, over the years, has accumulated a reputation and has put everything in the community,” he said.
The very nature of Speirs’s position as opposition leader was the basis of additional curial punishment, Mickan said.
“I say that his honor can take into account that there have been extensive reports and that he has destroyed his reputation,” he said.
But Hinton said: “The media did not destroy the reputation of this man, he did.”
Speirs will be sentenced on April 24.
[ad_2]
Source link
