Well then she should have used a reasonable rate plan and only spent $80, instead of using someone else's plan and racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars of their money.
If we want to follow the law to the letter we don't need judges, something like Watson would be more than adequate (and cheaper).
There's no indication that she's clueless or poor. A clueless person probably wouldn't have any use for the insane amount of data she downloaded. And a court probably wouldn't impose a $183,000 fine on a person who was both poor and disabled.
She's on a disability pension, but disability pensions aren't means-tested.
"You are 33 years old. You have one conviction for stealing in 2002. I accept it was probably a relatively minor matter because it was dealt with by way of a fine. Your upbringing was unstable in the extreme. You lived in the streets for most of your teenage years and became involved in drinking alcohol and drug taking. You have been diagnosed with depression and bi-polar disorder. You are socially isolated and spend long periods at home alone and accessing the Internet. You have no family support being largely estranged from parents and siblings. You are in receipt of a disability pension. You have incurred debts and have difficulty managing money. It is doubtful that you will ever repay the money stolen by your use of the card."
Evidently she spends a lot of time on the Internet, so she is not clueless in that sense, but from this description she doesn't sound very educated either.
Taking dspillett's example, if what the victim claimed (and even believed) to be a priceless Stradivarius actually turned out to be a modern mass-produced instrument, it'd be deeply unfair to make the defendant pay as if it were.
The sentence does seem harsh to me too, but generally speaking ignorance is not an acceptable defence espscially when the ignorance is not knowing/caring about the scale of the offence rather than just being ignorant that it is an offence at all.
Quite possibly. Intent often matters, e.g. involuntary manslaughter vs murder.
As for murder, the penalties there do differ depending on your state of mind, but that's not an issue of mistake (you can't try to third-degree murder someone but mistakenly first-degree murder them).
Not to say I agree with the punishment in this case, though.
In the theft and criminal damages context, you could have an analog, though we don't currently, where being judged guilty of one of the more major theft or damages offenses (like "theft over $X") requires an intent to cause that level of theft or damages. If you meant to cause $50 in damages and actually caused $50k, that could be a lesser offense than if you meant to cause $50k in damages. You'd be found guilty of essentially "damage over $X but with intent to only cause damage under $X", the way 3rd-degree murder and manslaughter are lesser offenses due to the lack of intent to cause death, even when there was intent to violently injure non-fatally.
When you get excused is if you didn't act purposefully... e.g. if you drive your car recklessly and kill someone you'll be guilty of manslaughter. If you purposefully hit someone with your car you'll be guilty of murder even if you only meant to break a few bones.
Basically they have a pretty tenuous, very expensive 3G network to serve an enormous sparsely populated area and they really don't want people to use it to download large amounts of data. They're happy to sell you a wired link for that purpose.
The problem here is Telstra and/or the power company for not securing their SIM card or account.
At the very least this "Mr. Freeman" should be involved in the case as he removed the SIM card, which is probably a violation in and of itself.