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In 2005, the then-Labor government in Tasmania imposed its puritanical views on the state and banned brothels. Not sex work: not even Labor deluded themselves that outlawing the world’s oldest profession was ever going to work. But they got half their way and banned anyone from owning a brothel or more than two sex workers working from the same premises.
This, I warned at the time, would do nothing but put women at risk. Brothels may be distasteful business, but they at least offer protection to the women working in them, both by enforcing safe-sex rules and from potentially violent customers.
Fifteen years later, a woman is dead and her killer is walking free, on the other side of the world. Thanks to both Labor’s ridiculous laws and a pathetic legal system that clearly prioritised easy plea deals above justice.
Now, her family and friends are having another crack at getting justice for Jingai Zhang.
German backpacker Tobias Pick strangled Launceston woman Jingai Zhang, then fled with her mobile phone and $2,400 without calling for help on Boxing Day 2020.
Prosecutors accepted Pick’s offer to plead guilty to manslaughter after he claimed he choked Ms Zhang, a sex worker, at her request.
This suggests a nearly criminal degree of negligence from prosecutors, or astounding ignorance. Neither are a good look. Despite what the movies say, it’s not quick to strangle someone to death. While people can lose consciousness in as little as 10 seconds, it takes minutes at least of continuous pressure to cause permanent brain damage or death. Suffice to say that, if someone keeps strangling an unconscious woman for minutes, at least, they’re clearly not begging for it.
And, as Tobias Pick may (hopefully) find out, double jeopardy ain’t gonna help him.
The ABC has confirmed the case is now before German authorities, highlighting a little-known legal process known as “mirror proceedings”.
Mirror proceedings mean that legal processes in one country can be replicated in another.
Under [Germany’s] law, a person can be prosecuted for a crime committed overseas even if they have already been convicted, if it is expected that the German sentence would be substantially longer than the sentence applied abroad.
Well, it could hardly be shorter than the frankly insulting sentence given to Pick, here in Tasmania.
Her killer, who hid for two days from police, was sentenced to five years for manslaughter and stealing, with a non-parole period of half that, in Hobart’s Risdon Prison.
Pick was deported to Germany in 2023 after serving his non-parole period.
Two-and-a-half years. That’s what Jingai Zhang’s life was worth, was it?
Ms Zhang’s husband, David Simmons, is among those who cannot make sense of the way the case was handled in Australia.
He has raised concerns that his wife’s job influenced the outcome.
“Yes, she was a sex worker, but the fact was she was still a person, and everyone’s got the right to do what they want to do with their life,” Mr Simmons said.
“No way it’s justice.”
As it turns out, Pick was generally being far from a good boy while he was in Tasmania.
The ABC investigation has also revealed that Pick’s ex-girlfriend told Tasmania Police he had been violent towards her, including during a fight before he killed Ms Zhang […]
According to court and coronial records, Pick, then 27 and travelling in Tasmania with his then-girlfriend, sought Ms Zhang’s services in Launceston twice.
Charmer, obviously.
The ABC has obtained previously unreported transcripts from two police interviews with Pick’s girlfriend of the time, also a German national, who told authorities the killer had been physically and emotionally abusive over their eight-month relationship.
She told Tasmania Police that they had fought in the hours before he killed Ms Zhang.
His anger started on December 25. She alleged Pick pushed her outside a Coles supermarket, and that his anger later escalated when she spoke with another man at their hostel, having previously asked her to refrain from talking “like this” to men.
According to the woman’s interview with police, Pick’s anger continued into the next day – Boxing Day […]
Pick left for the afternoon. When he spoke with his ex-girlfriend again early that evening, she alleged to police that he claimed he had been in a fight with a drug dealer after trying to buy enough cocaine to kill himself.
This appeared to be a fabrication. Pick had, in fact, visited Ms Zhang and killed her.
And robbed her. Taking money that several people testified Zhang kept in another room that she wouldn’t have allowed clients to roam in.
University of Melbourne law school professor Heather Douglas [said… ]
“I’m really surprised that from the outset there wasn’t a decision to pursue the charge of murder […] There seems to be quite a lot of evidence that could have supported it, and I think it should have been an opportunity for a jury to make a consideration about whether they were satisfied that there was a murder in this context or whether it was manslaughter.”
And the ‘manslaughterer’?
Pick is now a free man who, according to articles in his local newspaper, runs a cafe and fast-food venue with his pregnant girlfriend back in Adenau.
He has twice appeared in profile pieces in Rhein-Zeitung in which he asked to be known only as “Tobi”. According to translations, there was a reference to his travels, but no mention of his conviction.
He was granted parole in July 2023, and, according to German reports, his first cafe, Kleine-Auszeit (Small Break), opened the following month.
It has been confirmed that German authorities are investigating the case under German law, which allows prosecutors to independently examine crimes committed by German nationals abroad.
Maybe Jingai Zhang will get some kind of justice, yet.
Meanwhile, sex workers in Tasmania still have little protection from murderous creeps.
