The boys – aged 16 and 15 – were due to face a children’s court today after being charged with murder over the deaths of Chol Achiek, 12, and 15-year-old Dau Akueng.Â
They were allegedly set upon by a group of males at Cobblebank, in Melbourne’s outer north-west, on September 6 while walking home from a basketball match.
Prosecutors have applied for the two accused, who are among eight males charged over the murders, to undergo a compulsory procedure to obtain their DNA.
But the boys refused to get on the bus to court this morning, a youth justice custodial operations manager told the court.Â
The man said the teens met with their case managers and lawyers yesterday, who advised them they needed to attend because there was a court order in place.Â
However the teens repeatedly refused to get on the bus because they did not want to be subjected to the compulsory DNA procedure, the manager said.Â
He told the court there were no other measures youth justice could take to force teens to attend court when they refused.
The prosecutor asked if youth justice had the ability to use reasonable force but the manager said he did not believe it could.
Both teens had to come to court in person for the application for compulsory procedure to be heard, the magistrate said.
He said the refusals to attend were “not an infrequent occurrence” and almost amounted to frustrating the administration of justice.
The magistrate said he already made the order for youth justice to force the teens to attend but that had not worked.Â
The prosecutor suggested the court could sit at the youth justice centre to hear the application but the magistrate said that would not happen.
“We’re not all going out there,” he told the court.Â
“I’m not creating a scenario where we have the court sitting (at the centre) because a child refuses.”
The prosecutor said she would need some time to consider what other options were available to force the boys to attend.
The magistrate adjourned the application to Wednesday.
Three of the other accused, aged either 15 and 16, will return to a children’s court later in October for a rollover remand mention.
The adult co-accused – Prince Conteh, 19, Peter Addo, 18, and Abel Sorzor, 19 – will face Melbourne Magistrates Court in December.
