Court manager sacked after letting prisoner with arrest warrant walk free 

A court security manager challenged his dismissal through the Fair Work Commission after his employer sacked him for releasing a person in custody too early.

The Fair Work Commission’s (FWC) deputy president, Abbey Beaumont, recently dealt with an unfair dismissal application brought forward by a court security manager challenging the intricacies of his sacking by Ventia Australia.

Ventia provides court security and custody services to the state government of Western Australia under the Court Security and Custodial Services Contract, where it is responsible for the delivery of court security services at the majority of West Australian courthouses.

To ensure this delivery is run accordingly, a court security manager – the position the applicant held – is appointed to oversee employees working at the court, monitor persons held in court, monitor the situation, and ensure the necessary checks are made before a person is released from custody.

On 9 October 2024, however, when the applicant presided as the court security manager, an incident ultimately led to his dismissal.

According to Ventia, a person in custody (PIC) who was transferred from the Perth watch house to the court, and having appeared before the magistrate, was prematurely granted freedom under the manager’s watch – despite having an arrest warrant requiring them to remain in custody.

Ventia claimed that the manager failed to properly review, verify, or question the documents pertaining to the person in custody before they were released. In doing so, Ventia was fined $25,000, with time and effort also being expended in fixing the incident.

This culminated in a disciplinary process being undertaken, and the manager was ultimately dismissed.

Despite eventually challenging this dismissal through the FWC, the manager acknowledged his role in ensuring the necessary checks were undertaken before the person in custody’s release, while also acknowledging that he was “unfamiliar” with some of the documentation pertaining to the PIC.

Despite this, he argued in his application that both he and a control officer took “all the required steps in the release from custody process” and both signed off on the release.

He also asserted that he was aware of the arrest warrant regarding the person in custody, but claimed that it was “directed to the police and assumed that the police would be waiting for the PIC when he left the court”, which he claimed happens “from time to time”.

There was also nothing flagged to alert the manager that the PIC was to be transported to prison rather than released. He also claimed that the “magistrate granted the PIC bail” and said words to the effect of: “once you have signed the paperwork, you are free to go”.

In reviewing if the dismissal was unfair, Beaumont found that it was an “indubitable fact” that the arrest warrant was included in the documentation, with part of the warrant reading: “To: All police officers. This warrant authorises and commands you to arrest this prisoner and to take the prisoner to the nearest prison in Western Australia …”

Beaumont concluded that the PIC in question had an arrest warrant for suspended parole, but was facing the magistrate on “separate charges”, for which they were granted bail. However, all matters, including the suspended parole order, had not been dealt with, hence the arrest warrant.

“By the [manager’s] own evidence, two questions arose from that state of affairs: had bail been granted and liberty granted to the person in custody, or were the police going to attend to this arrest warrant and engage this person to be detained in custody further?

“Rather than check with the police, or confirm with court staff, or escalate with the court registrar and confirm the circumstances relating to the PIC, the [manager] decided, in circumstances where he himself acknowledged that he had not seen the particular type of document before, to release the PIC,” said Beaumont.

The manager claimed that he lacked the adequate training to deal with what he deemed as “unfamiliar” documentation, but Beaumont found that “… the [manager] still elected to process the release of the PIC when there was a document with which he was unfamiliar”.

“The [manager] did not escalate and query the document before making the decision to incorrectly release the PIC to freedom,” he said.

Beaumont dismissed the manager’s application as his conduct “breached [Ventia’s] release procedure”.