Director of Public Prosecutions v Coombe

[2017] VCC 1695

IN THE COUNTY COURT OF VICTORIA Revised
Not Restricted
Suitable for Publication

AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL JURISDICTION

CR 17-01355

DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS

v

ANTHONY COOMBE

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JUDGE:	HIS HONOUR JUDGE HIGHAM
WHERE HELD:	Melbourne
DATE OF HEARING:	6 November 2017
DATE OF SENTENCE:	17 November 2017
CASE MAY BE CITED AS:	DPP v Coombe
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION:	[2017] VCC 1695

REASONS FOR SENTENCE
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APPEARANCES:	Counsel	Solicitors
For the Director of Public Prosecutions	Mr M. Perry
For the Accused	Mr L. Dean

HIS HONOUR: 

1Anthony Coombe, you have pleaded guilty to one charge of armed robbery, two charges of theft of a motor vehicle, one charge of aggravated burglary, and one charge of handling stolen goods, namely a drop saw.  You have also admitted one charge of unlicensed driving and one charge of fraudulently using registration plates.

2The maximum penalty for the offence of armed robbery is 25 years' imprisonment.  The maximum penalty for the offence of aggravated burglary is 25 years' imprisonment.  The maximum penalty for theft of a motor vehicle is ten years' imprisonment.  The maximum penalty for the offence of handling stolen goods is 15 years' imprisonment.  The maximum penalty for unlicensed driving is 25 penalty units or three months' imprisonment.  And lastly, the maximum penalty for fraudulently using rego plates is 60 penalty units or six months' imprisonment.

3The circumstances of your offending are as follows.  On the morning of Friday 7 April 2017 at approximately 7.55 am, Catherine Brown was walking along Wingrove Street in Fairfield.  As she came to a pedestrian crossing you approached her and said to her, "Give me your wallet".  As you said this, you held a knife towards Ms Brown at about stomach height.  The knife was described by your victim as being similar to a hunting knife.

4Ms Brown asked you if you wanted money, to which you replied yes, and she then opened her wallet and removed $40 in notes, and then emptied the contents of the coin sleeve, which had about $5, into your hands.  You then took the money, walked past Ms Brown, saying to her, "Keep walking and don't look at me".

5You then stopped and turned back towards your victim, calling out to her that you now wanted her phone as well.  Fortunately for her, Ms Brown saw another male on the other side of the road, and quickly crossed the street to ask him for help.  You then jumped into a vehicle and made your getaway.  These are the agreed facts of Charge 1.

6Later that morning at about 9 am, you, Bradon Sabell, Jack Nelson and Elsa Murdolo, were all in a stolen black Mercedes Benz.  Whilst it is not alleged that any of you four were involved in the actual theft of the vehicle.  It is the case that all of you knew that the vehicle was stolen when you were travelling in it.  This is Charge 2.  Further, you were aware that the Mercedes bore stolen registration plates, 1BJ 7JX, uplifted Charge No.1. 

7Driving down Gillwell Road, Lalor, you noticed an open garage door with a white Mercedes parked inside.  This Mercedes belonged to Mr Tek Lay.  All four of you got out of the black Mercedes.  You entered the garage of the property whilst your three co-accused remained on the driveway to the property.  Inside the garage you spoke to Mr Lay demanding his car keys whilst holding a knife pointed towards him.  You made it clear that you wanted the keys to the white Mercedes.  These acts were in full view of your three companions, who were standing on the driveway to the property.

8Mr Lay told you that the Mercedes was his wife's car, and he did not know where the keys were.  As he was saying this, you walked past him through an internal door, and thus into the living room of the property.  Mr Lay followed you inside and gave you keys to his Nissan vehicle, parked in front of the house.

9As a result of the commotion, Mr Lay's grandson Nathan came downstairs and saw you standing in the doorway holding a knife.  You went back into the garage towards the white Mercedes, and at this point Mr Lay was able to close and lock the internal door leading from the residential part of his home to the garage.

10However, that was not the end of Mr Lay's ordeal, for when you realised that the car keys you had been given were not for the white Mercedes, you turned back towards the internal door and then forced your way into the living area of the house.  At this point, you knew that there were people present in the dwelling.  You were intent on stealing the motor vehicle, and you were armed.

11On entry, you were confronted by Nathan.  You then pointed the knife at him, and demanded the car keys.  You then seized a set of keys which were on the dining room table, and returning to the garage got into the driver's seat of the white Mercedes and reversed out of the driveway, and drove away at speed.

12The black Mercedes in which you had been the passenger was now being driven by your co-accused Mr Nelson, with Ms Murdolo and Mr Sabell as passengers.  This vehicle followed you at similar speed out of the area.

13The white Mercedes was observed on a street in Preston at approximately 9.45 am.  You were seated in the driver's seat with the door open and with keys to the vehicle in your hand.  Police approached the vehicle, and after some resistance you were placed under arrest and transported to the Mill Park Police Station.

14A plasterboard knife was found in the vehicle upon search, which matched the description given of the knife you were holding by Nathan at the time of the aggravated burglary.  When the black Mercedes was searched, a drop saw was discovered, which had been stolen from a ute at approximately 5.20 am on that morning.

15In your interview you made fulsome denials of any offending, and fulsome denials of knowing any of your co-accused.

16The matter resolved on 6 July 2017 at the first committal case conference in the Magistrates' Court.  A plea hearing was then fixed.  Pleas of guilty were thus entered at the earliest opportunity, and I give you full credit for those early pleas.

17I turn now to your personal circumstances.  You were born on 19 October 1991, and so you are now 26 years of age and you were 25 years of age at the time of the offending.  You are the second of three children.  You have limited contact with your older brother Damien, but you do have contact with your sister Sarah.  Your parents separated when you were aged ten or 11.  Your parents were drug-users.  After your parents separated you lived initially with your mother and her new partner.

18In the context of that blended family, you were a victim of family violence committed against you by your stepfather.  This violence was at times extreme, but it was always constant.  This led to you being placed for a brief period of time in foster care, before you were again placed in the custody of your mother.  You then moved back to live with your father, with whom you have lived intermittently.  You now, I am told, maintain contact with your father and have no contact with your mother.  So your childhood was marked by your exposure to violence, by emotional neglect, and by substance abuse.

19As a result of your parents' drug use, you had to be your own parent, and also the parent for your younger sister.  Your childhood trauma has led to you having chronic depression and anxiety.  Nonetheless, to your credit, you managed to complete year 12, VCAL, and you have had employment in cleaning, labouring, and at the Ingham’s Chicken Factory.  I am told that you have not had steady employment for some time.

20You have a lengthy history of substance abuse, which commenced at the age of 12 with the abuse of cannabis.  In your mid-teens you began using methamphetamine, and methamphetamine it is clear, Mr Coombe, is a drug which has been both your comfort and also your undoing, and to which you have unfortunately returned during your young life, and particularly at times of stress when you cannot cope with what is happening to you.

21You have also used other drugs, in particular GHB.  You have not yet experienced a problem with alcohol, although you get drunk on weekends with friends.  I am told that you have attended Moreland Hall for drug rehabilitation on two occasions.  Apparently to begin with you found it was not working, that is to say it was not helpful, but then you recognised that it did enable you to get off marijuana.

22You have been in a long-term and significant relationship with Ms Jade Kongas, with whom you have two young children, who are now aged seven and five, and who both live with their mother in Rosebud.  Your son, I am told, is experiencing learning difficulties.

23Mr Coombe, you have an extensive prior criminal history, going back to the Children's Court in 2003, for offending relating to vehicles, criminal damage, drugs and violence.  For these matters you have been dealt with over the years by means of bonds, probation, community-based orders, and most recently terms of imprisonment.  However, the longest term of imprisonment to date to which you have been sentenced, is a term of five months, which was imposed upon you on 2 September 2016 in combination with a community corrections order.

24It was following on your release from that sentence in November 2016 that your personal circumstances spiral downwards, precipitating a chain of events which forms the immediate background to your offending on this indictment, and for which I am dealing with you today.

25On your plea there was tendered a report from Ms Carla Lechner, clinical psychologist, dated 26 October 2017, and a community corrections order contravention report dated 8 September 2017.  I have read and carefully considered both these documents.

26Ms Lechner confirms your report of a chronically traumatic childhood, where you never felt safe at home, where you were chronically anxious and angry, and thus adversely affecting your ability to trust others, and as importantly, if not more so, your ability to feel good about yourself.  Let me make clear, Mr Coombe:  no child should have to have experienced that which you did.

27But as a result of the traumas of your childhood, you are highly sensitive to experiences of loss, rejection and being alone.  Ms Lechner describes your high emotional dependency needs, which are a direct result of your personal history, and thus you are inclined to become very attached in your intimate relationships, because they provide you with the emotional security of which you were deprived when you were a child.  It is when these relationships, and the importance that underpins them, is threatened, either in fact or by your perception, that you become destabilised.

28So looking for a sense of belonging, you found refuge in drugs from an early age, and you now confront the illness of addiction.  I have no doubt but that you are an addict and you are addicted to methamphetamine.

29Ms Lechner states that you benefit from residential drug rehabilitation programs that assist you both with relapse prevention, that is trying to devise techniques to not go back to using drugs, but more importantly underlying and exploring what lies underneath your addictions.  These underlying causes, I have no doubt, as does Ms Lechner, are to be found in your traumatic childhood.

30So you had a traumatic childhood, you cannot deal with feelings, and not being able to deal with feelings, you use drugs.

31Ms Lechner states that whilst you most likely have a genetic disposition for developing an addiction problem, in light of the fact that both your mum and your dad, as I understand it, have substance abuse histories, environmental factors, that is what was happening in the world around you, also play a part in you learning to use drugs as a means of self-medication.

32In short, drugs and alcohol have become your “go-to” means of coping in the face of any stress or any challenge that you experience.  But in particular, they are your “go-to” means of support in reaction to loss, to rejection, and to perceived abandonment.

33It seems that your life stabilised to a degree with your relationship with Ms Kongas, because apart from anything else you had a real family; someone to love you, and children.  A real family to provide you with a sense of belonging instead of the supposed family represented by your drug associates and peers.

34However, upon your release from prison in November 2016, you disengaged from Corrections and from the community correction order upon which you had been placed.  You learnt that Ms Kongas had started a relationship with someone else whilst you had been in custody, or certainly to use the old-fashioned term, she was seeing someone else, and that had begun whilst you had been in custody.

35This presented an immediate challenge to your sense of wellbeing, and in consequence you returned to your familiar comfort at times of stress, that is to say your methamphetamine use.

36This was four days, I am instructed, prior to the offending for which you now fall to be sentenced.

37I accept for you, Mr Coombe, can I make very clear, that this was a coping strategy.  But it was clearly, blindingly obviously, the wrong one.  Your disengagement was a result of a deliberate choice that you had made, with all the risks attendant upon that choice.

38It appears that hours before this offending, you visited your mother, who supplied you with pills later found to be Xanax.  You took those pills, and as a result you cannot now clearly recall what happened thereafter, including, I take it, an inability to clearly recall your offending.  However, I accept that you take full responsibility for your actions.

39As for the future, Mr Coombe, any prospect of your rehabilitation depends upon your effective engagement in and treatment for both your drug addiction and the underlying causes.  Until that occurs, your prospects for the future must remain guarded at best.  Until that occurs and you are able to beat your addiction, your life is going to slip away, and as it slips away, it will consist in addiction, it will consist in more offending, it will consist in longer and longer term of imprisonments, and may very well end in death.  Not from old age, asleep in your bed.  I cannot emphasise enough, Mr Coombe, that the choice now is yours and only yours.

40Aggravated burglary and armed robbery constitute serious offending.  This is made perfectly clear by the maximum penalty passed by parliament.  On a weekday morning you produced a knife in order to rob your victim of what was in her wallet.  Whilst I accept that this robbery can be characterised as a low-range example of the offence, nonetheless it must have engendered fear and distress in the mind of your victim.

41Members of the public, Mr Coombe, must be able to go about this business without fear, and certainly the courts will do everything they can to denounce such behaviour and to protect the public.

42Later on that same morning, and being driven in a vehicle that you knew was stolen, you entered firstly the garage and then the residential part of the home of Mr Lay, who was at that time 75 years of age.  You carried a plasterboard knife.  On the second occasion of entry you forced your way into the house by the internal door, and pointed the knife at Mr Lay's 18-year-old grandson, Nathan.  You seized the keys to a white Mercedes and drove off.

43Mr Lay has written a victim impact statement, which was tendered on the plea.  In that statement he speaks of his sense of loss.  He describes feeling less safe at home, and being fearful now whenever he opens the garage door.  So now he closes the garage door, and closing his garage door he feels he has lost that connection with his neighbours and the neighbourhood where he has lived for almost 35 years without ever having to worry about the people around him.

44Your offending has triggered anxiety, for which he has received counselling.  His sleep has been affected, and he becomes more agitated by little things and feels less independent and less sociable.  He states that he does not know if he will ever live the carefree life that he had prior to being the victim of your offending.  You have taken part of his life away.

45On the plea Mr Perry, the learned prosecutor, submitted that the primary sentencing purposes were those of general and specific deterrence.  Your counsel, in what were succinct, the point, helpful and may I say able submissions, identified in summary five planks of mitigation.

46Firstly, that the armed robbery could be classified in the lower range of the offending, in that it was not pre-planned, it was unsophisticated, and that you were not disguised.  He also urged these matters as relevant considerations in assessing the objective seriousness of the aggravated burglary and the vehicle theft.

47Secondly, he relied upon your plea of guilty, which was entered at the earliest opportunity, sparing the court both time and resources, and evidencing a willingness to facilitate the course of justice, and the consequential discount to which you are entitled.

48Third, the degree of remorse that you have shown for your offending, both in your comments to Ms Lechner, where you were able to identify the effect that your actions may have had upon your victims, and the remorse that is represented by your guilty plea.

49Fourth, your relative youth and the sentencing principles that are thus engaged.

50Finally, the principle of totality, to which I must have regard and which should be expressed in appropriate orders for cumulation.

51Mr Dean your counsel accepted that a term of imprisonment was the only disposition available in this case.  Your learned counsel accepted that this offending represented a marked escalation, that is to say, Mr Coombe, you have gone up three or four notches in your offending, and as such you are going to serve a term of imprisonment significantly and substantially longer than any imposed upon you up to this date.

52However, Mr Dean submitted that in light of remorse that you have demonstrated, your relative youth and the family support which might very well be available to you, it was both open and, he submitted, appropriate to impose a longer than usual parole period so as to ensure that your prospects of rehabilitation would be best preserved.

53Mr Coombe, in sentencing you I must have regard to a range of different factors.  I must give effect to principles of both general deterrence and specific deterrence.  That is to say I must deter others from behaving like you did, and I must deter you from repeating such behaviour.  I must express the community's denunciation of your conduct, and I should promote, if possible, your rehabilitation.  I take into account the effect your crimes have had on your victims, and I must have regard to current sentencing practices as determined and described by the Court of Appeal for the kind of offence you have committed.

54In short, I must try to balance your personal circumstances with the circumstances of your offending.

55Clearly, principles of general deterrence and specific deterrence, just punishment and denunciation, and in my view protection of the public, are primary sentencing considerations in your case.

56I do accept that the insight you demonstrated in your conversation with Ms Lechner, is genuine.  However, it is clear, unfortunately, Mr Coombe, that any insight you have into your offending and your behaviour when you are drug-free, is lost when you under the influence of drugs.  And so we come back to what I had said to you earlier:  you have got to stop taking drugs.

57I further accept that your traumatised upbringing has led you to become reliant upon drugs, which form a background to your offending.  I take this into account in tempering your sentence to a certain degree.  However, it is clear that when you came out of prison at the end of November 2016 and learnt that your partner had started a relationship with someone else, you made a deliberate choice to disengage from the Corrections order, and more importantly from the support that had been made available to you and which was open to you, to talk through your feelings.  Instead you turned to your own remedy, the appalling drug methamphetamine, to deal with your problem.

58Your self-medication, in which your mother was complicit, led directly to this offending, offending of which you had barely any memory at the time of your arrest and your interview.  And this is offending which will have a long-term, if not lifelong, traumatic effect upon your victims.

59It is clear, Mr Coombe, that whilst you continue to use drugs, your prospects are poor.  You need to break the cycle of your drug use, and shortly, only you can do that.  Only you can make the hard choices necessary to begin to reclaim and live your own life separate from the baggage of your past.  I hope you understand what I am saying to you, Mr Coombe, and I know your counsel will explain it to you.  Hopefully you understand what I am saying to you directly.

60In sentencing you, it take into account your relative youth; that the offending was neither pre-planned nor sophisticated; your plea of guilty at the earliest opportunity, which I recognise as having both a utilitarian benefit, but is also indicative of remorse; the prospect of continued family support from Ms Kongas and the protective factors such support may represent; your guarded prospects for rehabilitation; and the principle of totality.

61If you stand up, Mr Coombe, please.

62I sentence you as follows:

63On Charge 1, armed robbery, 21 months' imprisonment.

64On Charge 2, theft of motor vehicle, six months' imprisonment.

65On Charge 3, aggravated burglary, four years' imprisonment.

66On Charge 5, theft of a motor vehicle, 12 months' imprisonment.

67On Charge 10, handling stolen goods, six months' imprisonment.

68Unlicensed driving, three months' imprisonment and disqualified for 12 months.

69Fraudulently using registration plates, convicted and dismissed.

70I order that 12 months of the sentence on Charge 1, three months of the sentence on Charge 2, and one month of the sentence on Charge 10 run cumulative to each other and cumulative to the sentence on Charge 3.

71This makes a total effective sentence of five years and four months.

72I fix a non-parole period of three years and three months.

73Pursuant to s.18(4) of the Sentencing Act 1991, I direct that you have served 224 days of the sentence that I have imposed upon you, and I direct that this be recorded in the records of the court.

74Pursuant to s.6AAA of the Sentencing Act 1991, I indicate that but for your plea of guilty, you would have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment of seven years with a non-parole period of five years and six months.

75Mr Coombe, I hope you have been able to listen to what I have said to you, and I wish you best in the struggle that lies ahead for you.  I hope you can reclaim your life.  Mr Dean, are there any custody management issues?

76MR DEAN:  No, Your Honour.

77HIS HONOUR:  No.  All right then, let him go down.  I am going to stand the matter down for the next one.  Mr Dean, can I thank you for your assistance in this matter.

78MR DEAN:  Thank you, Your Honour.

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