The increasing willingness of Australian courts to take into account traditional tribal law when sentencing Aboriginal offenders has been highlighted by two high-profile cases.
Aborigines who commit violent crimes such as rape or murder are frequently punished by their own communities, typically by being stabbed in the legs with a spear.
But they are often then tried and punished a second time by the mainstream legal system, which they say is unfair.
Last week judges in two courts took into account elements of Aboriginal justice, which are often radically at odds with mainstream law.
In the Northern Territory an Aboriginal man who had attacked six of his close relatives with an iron bar was spared jail after a Supreme Court judge accepted his defence that he was possessed by a sorcerer spirit.
Roderick James, 23, told the court he was under the spell of a kadaitja spirit when he attacked his victims and set fire to a mattress in a shed where his seven-year-old nephew was sleeping.
Judge David Angel sentenced James, from a remote desert settlement, to five years in jail but then suspended the term and released him.
