Parole Denied Despite Supreme Court Rebuke: The Farhat Case and the Tension Between Courts and Corrections
A New South Wales parole board has denied release to Mohommed Farhat for a second time, setting aside a Supreme Court ruling that called the case a likely 'serious miscarriage of justice' The Guardian.
Farhat, 22, pleaded guilty to 15 property damage offences after writing 'Fuk Israel' on cars and setting another vehicle alight in Woollahra in November 2024. He was initially due for release on parole in December after serving 10 months. The commissioner for corrective services, Gary McMahon, made a rare intervention to revoke that parole order without his lawyers being heard.
In March, McMahon told the parole authority that Farhat's offending showed support for 'extremist' behaviour. The parole authority's formal decision, handed down on Monday five months after that hearing, stated the offending was 'reflective of a deep-seated adherence on the part of the offender to an extremist ideology of an antisemitic character' The Guardian.
The parole authority did not consider the findings of NSW Supreme Court Justice Desmond Fagan, who ruled against the state after it sought a supervision order for Farhat using the Terrorism Act. Justice Fagan found there was an 'insignificant' risk that Farhat, whom he described as of 'limited intellect', would commit a serious terrorism offence. The judge ruled that police, lower courts, and various state agencies incorrectly labelled Farhat's actions antisemitic rather than 'a curse against a foreign state'. Justice Fagan also accepted Farhat's explanation that he was paid to undertake the vandalism, a finding the parole authority explicitly rejected in its own decision The Guardian.
Counter-terrorism police had determined three weeks after Farhat's arrest that he was not ideologically motivated. Gary McMahon admitted in budget estimates on Monday that he had not consulted with specialist police before making his arguments that Farhat posed a terrorism risk and his offending was antisemitic. The timeline of the broader threat environment includes incidents such as cars and houses in Sydney being daubed in antisemitic graffiti in early February 2025 Reuters. Farhat also has a Hezbollah tattoo on his neck.
Under standard procedure, people sentenced to less than three years in jail in New South Wales are typically released on parole when it comes due. Farhat's case first appeared on the parole authority's court list for the week commencing 9 February 2026 under the name 'Michael Farhat Mohommed Ah-See' NSW State Parole Authority.
The broader context here is a structural friction between judicial findings and executive discretion in the corrective services system. A Supreme Court justice has formally characterised the escalation of this case through the Terrorism Act as a miscarriage of justice. The parole authority, operating within its statutory mandate, then issued a finding of antisemitic extremism that directly contradicts both the counter-terrorism police assessment and Justice Fagan's ruling. In other words, two branches of the same state government are applying different evidentiary standards to the same set of facts. McMahon's admission that he bypassed specialist police consultation before asserting a terrorism risk deepens that disconnect. It leaves his intervention looking less like a calibrated security assessment and more like an autonomous executive posture. The result is a system where a defendant cleared by the judiciary of ideological motivation remains detained on the explicit premise of that same motivation.
The case also raises procedural questions about the independence of parole decisions from executive influence. When the parole authority declines to weigh a Supreme Court finding and instead relies on its own characterisation of the offender's intent, it opens a gap between what the courts determine and what administrative bodies enforce. The five-month gap between the March hearing and the Monday decision, coupled with concurrent budget estimates questioning of McMahon, points to institutional pressure shaping administrative outcomes. Farhat's actual guilt regarding property damage is not in dispute; his guilty plea settled that. What is in dispute is the state's authority to reclassify non-ideological, paid vandalism as extremist terrorism absent supporting police intelligence, and to do so in a manner that circumvents the judiciary's assessment of risk.
