Nationalist activist Joel Davis has been released on bail after spending 133 days in solitary confinement in an unsafe and dilapidated Sydney prison for an alleged Telegram post.
Mr Davis, 31, was arrested at a Bondi café on November 20 and charged with “using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend” for allegedly urging his followers to “rhetorically rape” federal MP Allegra Spender, and was refused jail on three previous occasions.
He appeared in the NSW Supreme Court on Thursday where he applied for bail again in front of Justice Natalie Adams, who found he did not present an unacceptable risk to the community, and ordered his release from Long Bay Correctional Complex.
Justice Adams imposed almost 20 bail conditions, including that Mr Davis not be in possession of a smart phone, not use social media or encrypted devices or apps, report to police three times a week, and not contact or approach Ms Spender or NSW Liberal leader Kellie Sloane, who the court heard he had also posted about on his Telegram channel.
Mr Davis is also banned from entering the MPs’ electorates of Wentworth and Vaucluse in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, and from going within 100 metres of their offices, and must take part in a program run by the NSW Chaplains’ Association.
He will be required to reside with his mother in Sydney’s west, and Justice Adams told the court she would not have released him to his previous residence in Bondi, in part due to alleged online comments about the Jewish community.
The court heard Mr Davis was now facing nine new counts of the same offence in relation to the original post, which were laid on March 20, and that if the case went to trial it could be as late as the “backend of 2027”.
In handing down her decision Justice Adams noted that Mr Davis had spent more than four months in “onerous” and “unusual conditions” in custody, and that he had only had one visit since his arrest on November 20.
“Because of his suspected political affiliations he’s being kept in segregation and hasn’t been outside since the 24th of December and is only having a shower once every four days,” she told the court.
Mr Davis’s barrister Sebastian De Brennan, assisted by Sheena Swan for Paladin Lawyers, told the court it was his client’s first time in custody, that he missed the birth of his child, and that his experience behind bars had been “salutary” and made him examine how he expressed his views.
Barrister Sheridan Goodwin for the Crown asked the court to refuse bail, arguing that Mr Davis “posed a risk to the emotional safety of other individuals”, and that there was an unacceptable risk he would reoffend or “incite others” to make similar social media posts.
But Justice Adams found the risk of “breaches to social cohesion” could be ameliorated by the strict conditions she imposed, and that the evidence before her suggested Mr Davis would comply with the conditions.
“The applicant holds extreme political views and had expressed them in the past, but seems to me the applicant may have changed his mindset, he is now the father of a young baby, and is going to have to live with missing the birth for rest of his life,” she told the court.
She told the court that while Mr Davis knew he was due to become a father at the time of the alleged offending, the birth was a “pro-social factor that should help him comply with bail conditions”.
Justice Adams further found that all of his current charges, including for a belt buckle with an eagle on it in South Australia, and for “hate speech” in Victoria, related to his former membership of the National Socialist Network.
“[The NSN] is now disbanded, so that platform no longer exists,” she told the court.
She also noted that in a police interview after his arrest Mr Davis had insisted that he and his former organisation were “non-violent except in self-defence”, and that he had no history of violence.
Header image: Left, right, Joel Davis at demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney (supplied)
The post Nationalist activist Joel Davis granted bail after 133 days in isolation for Telegram post first appeared on The Noticer.
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