A pair of Chinese men have escaped prosecution over a truckload of more than 2 million illegal cigarettes after a judge found police “racially profiled” their associates and should not have pulled them over.
The men, both 38, were found with 2,135,200 black market Double Happiness cigarettes weighing 1,379kg in their truck after being pulled over in Gundagai in September, 2023, and charged with illegal tobacco possession.
But NSW District Court Judge Jennifer English threw out the charges after finding that the decision to stop the truck was based on a police officer “racially profiling” four of their associates who were travelling “in convoy” with them in a green Mercedes G-Wagon, The Daily Telegraph reported.
The court heard a female police sergeant pulled over the G-Wagon, conducted checks on the occupants, found two truck rental receipts, and then radioed ahead for other officers to look for the trucks.
Judge English noted in her judgement the officer “reluctantly” conceded that she didn’t pull the G-Wagon over for a random breath test, but because she wanted to talk to the occupants, said ‘so he’s, like, the high roller in the back that owns the car’ after identifying a male passenger as the owner, and observed the four men in side as “wearing relatively high-end clothing with expensive watches”.
“To refer to a potentially successful property developer, who happens to own an expensive vehicle, and who happens to be Asian, as a ‘high-roller’, I find is reprehensible,” Judge English said.
“I asked rhetorically, ‘had the owner of the vehicle seated in the back been Gina Rinehart being chauffeur-driven, would she be described as a high-roller? I think not’.
“There is nothing suspicious about an owner of an expensive vehicle being seated in the back seat, and in effect being chauffeur driven.”
Judge English went on to describe the stopping of the G-Wagon as a “ruse on the part of police to enable them to ‘investigate’ the G-Wagon or ‘check it out’ when they knew they had no legal power to do so”.
She noted that there was no forensic evidence linking the accused to the cigarettes, and that allowing any such evidence to be admitted would “amount to nothing less than condoning the behaviour of the NSW Police and promoting a likelihood that it will continue”.
“Unfortunately nothing has been learned by police despite there being numerous decisions of this and other courts to discourage this kind of unlawful and improper conduct,” she said while ordering no further proceedings be made against the pair.
The prosecution also admitted some of the police conduct during the stopping of the G-wagon was done in contravention of the law.
The cigarettes had an excise worth $2,539,822.54, and Judge English said she while she acknowledged the deprivation of government revenue by illegal tobacco sales, the “racial profiling” was “extremely troubling”.
Header image: Illegal Double Happiness cigarettes seized by police.
