Ms Stern said the magistrate twice ordered for defendants to be held in custody when no one requested it and did not give lawyers from either side a chance to respond, leading to one man, Mr A, being detained at the court for three hours after attending for driving charges. A second man, Mr B, was 18 and arrived at court unrepresented for a driving offence when the magistrate asked him, "Why should I not send you to jail?" A Legal Aid lawyer sitting in the court began making submissions on Mr B's behalf, Ms Stern said, but the magistrate ordered that he be placed into the fully enclosed dock and he was then taken down to the court cells. He was held in custody for an hour. "No reason was given for remanding Mr B in custody," Ms Stern said. "Neither was he given an opportunity to make submissions before he was remanded in custody." Ms Stern said the magistrate then spoke to a Legal Aid lawyer and the police prosecutor in the corridor outside, and said words to the effect of, "I've put Mr B in the dock to give him a bit of a scare".

A third man, Mr G, was in custody for a week for stealing a poker machine payout ticket worth $167.39 after the magistrate asked if police were applying to revoke his bail and the police prosecutor responded "yes". A week later, she reversed her decision and acknowleged it had been in error. The magistrate is also accused of saying to police prosecutors that "there must be other charges laid" against a woman, Ms Q, and saying of a man, Mr P, "are there other charges pending, and if not why not?" Ms Stern said the magistrate's actions had a significant impact on people who were "vulnerable members of the community", some of whom were subjected to "repeated misbehaviour" during the course of their case. One vulnerable defendant, she said, was a cognitively disabled Indigenous man who stole a bike and was given a suspended sentence that was twice the maximum penalty. "Some of the accused affected by Her Honour's alleged misbehaviour experienced evident fear and distress," Ms Stern said.

"Actual injustice can be seen to have been occasioned as a result of her honour's conduct." Ms Burns' barrister, Arthur Moses, SC, said his client "accepts without reservation that mistakes were made by her which should not have been made". "These mistakes were not deliberate nor was there any wilful blindness," Mr Moses said. He said the errors need to be examined through the prism of a "crushing workload" of more than 1100 pending cases when the magistrate arrived at Port Macquarie, which impacted her mental health. "That could be described as a tsunami, not just a huge caseload," Mr Moses said.