Director of Public Prosecutions v Esposito
[2014] VCC 1164
•23 July 2014
| IN THE COUNTY COURT OF VICTORIA | Revised Not Restricted Suitable for Publication |
AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Case No. CR-13-01035
| DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS |
| v |
| ROCCO ESPOSITO |
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JUDGE: | Her Honour Judge Cohen | |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne | |
DATE OF HEARING: | 7 July 2014 | |
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 23 July 2014 | |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | DPP v Esposito | |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2019] VCC 1164 | |
REASONS FOR SENTENCE
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Catchwords: Sentencing; pleas of guilty; two armed robberies of convenience stores, burglary and theft; prior sentences for similar offences in same time period; effect of delay; rehabilitation; relapse into drug &/or alcohol abuse; totality with prior offences for which sentences completed.
Cases Cited: R v Merrett, Piggott and Ferrari [2007] VSCA 1, Johnston v R [2013] VSCA 362
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APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the Crown | Ms Sedgewick (on plea) Ms H. Pearson(on sentence) | OPP |
| For the Accused | Mr A.L. Hands | McNamaras Lawyers & Barristers |
HER HONOUR:
1 Mr Esposito I have a lot to explain about your sentence. You can stay seated until I ask you to stand.
2 Rocco Esposito, you have pleaded guilty to two charges of armed robbery and one each of burglary and theft.
3 The maximum penalty for armed robbery is 25 years imprisonment, and for burglary and theft it is 10 years imprisonment for each.
4 The offences in question occurred over a seven month period in 2011. You claim to have no memory of any of them, and have pleaded guilty because of forensic matches to your DNA.
5 Charge 1 arises from events at about 3.20 a.m. on 15 February 2011 at a 7-Eleven store in Carlton. The only attendant working there that night, Mr Raghavendar Gudepu, was outside the counter area when you entered the store holding a broken beer bottle neck, with cloth over your lower face and covering your mouth. You went up to him saying, "Give me the money" and standing about half a metre away started waving the broken bottle towards his chest. You continued to shout at him to give you the money. He feared he would be hurt if he did not give you money, so he went through the security door to the cashier area, obtained money from the register drawer and handed the notes over the counter to you. You took the cash, about $300, and ran from the store, dropping the glass bottle onto the ground outside. You were subsequently identified from DNA left on the broken beer bottle.
6 Charge 2 is also of armed robbery. On 23 April 2011 at about 12.45 a.m. you ran into the shop of a BP service station in Kealba, holding a cloth smelling of petrol and a lighter, and shouting, "Petrol, petrol". You demanded cash and were yelling and "petrol", and threatened to light the cloth you were holding. You had a lighter in your hand which you ignited as you yelled this.
7 Understandably the shop assistant working there, Jinlong Ge, was scared that you would set the shop on fire. He opened the till, pulled out the cash drawer and placed it on the counter. You took all of the notes, estimated to be approximately $400 to $500. You then dropped the cloth on the bench and ran away with the money. The cloth which had a strong smell of petrol, also had traces of your DNA.
8 Charges 3 and 4 arise from one event on 27 August 2011. The owner of a pizza shop in East Keilor had locked up at about 12.45 a.m.. Some time after that he received a call about a break-in, returned to the shop and found a smashed window on the front door, and that cash of approximately $30 had been taken from the premises. There was DNA located in blood left on the broken window of the front door. These events give rise to the charges of burglary and theft from that pizza shop. It is not know whether it was you personally or a co-offender who actually entered the shop and stole the cash.
9 All of these offences, but in particular the armed robberies, deserve very strong condemnation by courts. The targeting of shops open late at night and usually staffed with only one attendant, is cowardly, and has become all too prevalent as they are seen as “soft” targets. The people working there are often employees simply doing their best to earn a living, and do not deserve to be threatened and frightened by people such as you.
10 It is no excuse whatsoever to say that you do not remember what occurred, because you were too intoxicated or drug affected, or that the immediate cause of such behaviour was excessive consumption of drugs and/or alcohol. The confronting of shop attendants with makeshift weapons which are capable of inflicting very serious injuries, especially in the hands of a person acting with diminished or disinhibited judgment due to intoxication, is likely to cause very real fear, and potentially to cause serious harm.
11 There are no victim impact statements from these incidents, but I have read the statements made to police by each of the victims about the incidents. I infer that for the victims of charges 1 and 2, being confronted by you in the early hours of the morning when working alone in a shop was a frightening experience, and each was genuinely afraid that he would be harmed if he did not hand over all the available cash to you.
12 While not subjected to that type of fear, I accept that the owner of the pizza shop was annoyed and inconvenienced by having to attend his shop out of hours, have repairs carried out, and was out of pocket, despite being insured.
13 An important sentencing factor in this case must be general deterrence, that is, to send a message to other people tempted to engage in this type of offending that such offences will received stern punishment.
14 How stern that should be in your case, and the arguments put on your behalf in mitigation, inter-relate with your history before me on a previous occasion.
15 A little over two years ago you came before me in this court, and pleaded guilty to one charge of attempted armed robbery and one of armed robbery. Both arose out of incidents occurring on 3 February 2011, when you entered convenience stores in the early hours of the morning carrying a piece of broken glass and threatening the sole staff member in each with harm, unless you were handed money.
16 I heard what I found to be evidence strongly suggesting that your behaviour then had been uncharacteristic, that you were shocked and genuinely remorseful about what you had done, and had already taken action to address your problems including the binge drinking that was said to have been the cause of your offences that day, and also to address psychological conditions in your background. I was persuaded to impose non-custodial sentences, finding the mitigatory material and rehabilitative progress strong. I imposed a Community Corrections Order for one charge, and a suspended sentence for the other, both of which were completed without breach and have now expired.
17 I now learn that the offences on 3 February 2011 were not the result of one night of isolated and uncharacteristic behaviour by you. The armed robbery of the 7-Eleven store the subject of Charge 1, was committed less than two weeks after the offences for which I last sentenced you, and was of a similar nature, even down to a broken glass bottle being used as the weapon.
18 Some two months later, the entering of the service station shop carrying a petrol-soaked piece of cloth and lighting a cigarette lighter was potentially an even more threatening incident for the shop attendant, and certainly very dangerous behaviour.
19 The burglary and theft at the pizza shop in late August 2011 are, objectively speaking, less serious as they did not involve threatening any person, none being present. However, the timing of that incident is a particular concern as I shall explain shortly.
20 All of these offences were traced to you through your DNA profile being placed on the state's database. That was as a result of orders made by me on 13 June 2012 when I sentenced you for the two earlier offences. You were arrested and charged with the current offences in November 2012. You were interviewed by police but on legal advice made a “no comment” record of interview.
21 The history since is that these charges were listed for a contested committal hearing, but I understand that this was timed so as to allow for DNA reports to be obtained. As a result, the committal hearing proceeded in June 2013 by way of a straight hand-up brief without any witnesses being called, and you were committed for trial in this court where you initially pleaded not guilty, but the charges were the subject of negotiation, and on 19 December 2013 you were arraigned and pleaded guilty to each of these charges. Your plea hearing was first listed for May of this year, but was adjourned in order to have it brought before me, and I was unavailable to hear it until this month.
22 Your pleas of guilty to these charges entitle you to some leniency. I accept that the delays at the committal stage were due to the wait for formal DNA analysis reports, and the prosecution acknowledges that you saved the witnesses the stress of being cross-examined at that stage, and subsequently pleaded guilty to these charges at a relatively early stage.
23 In those circumstances there was the utilitarian value in saving the time and cost of disputed hearings. You also saved the victims the time, and particularly the stress, of having to give evidence and relive these events, and you accepted responsibility for your actions. The pleas of guilty can also be taken to reflect some remorse by you. I shall state after I announce your sentence what the sentence would have been had you not pleaded guilty.
24 So far as your personal history is concerned, when I last sentenced you, you were 34 years old, had been married since your early 20s, and were living with your wife and three children under ten years of age. You had no relevant prior criminal history. Despite saying that you had been using illegal drugs since your teenage, this was apparently unknown to your wife until the first offences came to light, and unknown to your parents until August last year.
25 You had worked since age 16, but in seeking to improve your family's financial prospects, had bought a franchise of a business that unfortunately failed within months, causing significant financial loss and hardship, putting strain on your marriage, attracting criticism from extended family members, and causing you to turn to binges of drug and alcohol consumption.
26 You had, however, by the time the case came before me, taken a number of steps to get your life back on track, obtaining casual labouring employment, and treatment for what was diagnosed to be an underlying adjustment disorder of depression and anxiety, and a borderline personality disorder arising from your family circumstances during childhood and adolescence.
27 You were attending a psychiatrist, Dr Maloney, with whom you had established a good therapeutic relationship, had attended some counselling from a psychologist Ms McNamara, had become much more open with your wife in discussing your problems, and she felt more hopeful about you being willing to discuss with her your problems when they arose, and because a condition explaining your behaviour had been diagnosed and was treatable.
28 Unfortunately, while you have continued to attend Dr Maloney, other parts of that rehabilitative process did not succeed. You had by the middle of last year relapsed into using methyl amphetamine, or “Ice”, and in approximately August your wife left you, and your three children are now with her. I gather that there is an unresolved dispute about your having contact with them, and being unable to see them causes you considerable distress. The counselling with Ms McNamara had ceased in November 2011, and although Dr Maloney referred you for a second series of counselling in January this year, that has not been taken up.
29 Dr Maloney provided a report and gave evidence again before me, and said that he had continued to treat you, usually on a monthly basis. He confirmed his original diagnosis of an Axis I condition and an Axis II borderline personality disorder, for which you were prescribed medication which I understood was still currently Lexapro. He was aware that you had had several relapses into taking non prescribed drugs. He thought it was mainly ice. He had referred you and your wife for couples counselling at the Cairnmillar Institute last year, but you rang him on 9 August last year saying that your wife had left with the children a week earlier, and you had been using drugs heavily since she left.
30 He assisted you to gain admission to VicDor, about which you had heard, that being a residential centre addressing alcohol and narcotic addictions. You completed a 28 day residential program, then moved into a halfway house setting in Craigieburn still under the supervision of the VicDor program, and attending AA and NA meetings as part of that program. You reportedly engaged well, while struggling with facing the consequences of the breakdown of your family through your relapse into drug addiction.
31 I am told that since leaving the halfway house in December you have continued to attend AA and NA meetings, and there was a man to support you in court from AA.
32 You continue to attend Dr Maloney's appointments and he records you reporting staying free of alcohol and drugs ever since. A series of urine screens commissioned by your GP from April to June confirm negative results from any illicit drugs.
33 From what you have told him, Dr Maloney believes that you have separated from a former peer group with whom he believes you used to offend, although I heard nothing of that on the last hearing. He also has been told by you that you have separated from seeing extended family members who, Dr Maloney understood, had caused you trouble. It is Dr Maloney's belief that you have not offended while he has been working with you, although charges 3 and 4 arise from an incident after he had already had two consultations with you. He first learned of these charges in December 2012 when you told him you were likely to be charged. It is his understanding from what you have subsequently told him, that your offending was all when you were drug affected, but you have no memory of what you did. That, in his opinion, is a result of your personality disorder, the drugs being your quick fix for your psychological problems.
34 I am concerned that you had your third appointment with Dr Maloney only two days after the burglary and theft at the pizza shop but made no mention to him, either that two nights earlier you had been breaking into and stealing from a shop, or even that you had been so drugged or alcohol affected two nights earlier that you had no recollection of what you did that night. I find it difficult to believe that at that stage you had no memory at all, even of having become so drunk or drug affected as to have no memory of what you had done. Dr Maloney says he is not surprised that you would have relapsed, as he had not yet had time to teach you coping or avoidance mechanisms, and you would not have trusted him enough at that early stage to tell him what had occurred.
35 In March this year you moved back to live with your parents. You have also obtained employment working with your father as a boner at a meatworks, currently doing four days a week as the workload is seasonal. Your father gave evidence on your behalf indicating his support for you. He says he did not know you had a problem with drugs or alcohol until last year when you admitted yourself to the rehabilitation centre. He had noticed that for about two months before that, you were always angry and yelling, so he suspected something was wrong, but had not known that your previous court appearance was related to drug or alcohol use. He said he knew you were going to court previously, but you said you were too embarrassed to have him come to court. Although you told him you had a suspended sentence and had to do community work, he thought it was connected with the failure of your business.
36 I accept that your parents want to support you through what they would know are troubling times, especially with the break-up of your marriage. It seems there is much you have not told them for a long time, and while that is consistent with my being told two years ago that you had long found it very difficult to face and discuss your problems with anyone, I suspect that your parents' understanding of what has brought you to your current situation is very limited. In particular, I doubt that they know that Dr Maloney has diagnosed that you have a borderline personality disorder which he attributes to aspects you have told him of your parents' upbringing of you. He says that you are old enough now to cope with or resist the aspects of how they treated you, which caused the disorder, so he disagrees that there is any concern about you now living back in their household. I am doubtful that you will cope with living with them for long, but do accept that you have stable and what is intended to be, supportive, living arrangements at present.
37 I now turn to the submissions put on your behalf.
38 First, it is submitted that in this case the delay since the commission of these offences is a powerful mitigatory factor. I accept that the authorities make clear that where there has been delay, particularly delay not attributable to the offender, there should be recognition that the delay will have placed the person under a degree of strain that itself is mitigatory. Further, if rehabilitative steps taken during that time have been positive, that will also be mitigatory.
39 As Maxwell P said in R v. Merrett, Piggott and Ferrari, a sentencing court looks to the future as well as to the past. There is very great benefit to the community at large as well as to the individuals themselves and their immediate families, if future criminal activity can be avoided, and it is important that courts recognise and reward efforts at rehabilitation.
40 Your counsel also submits that with such delay as has occurred here, you would have a legitimate sense of injustice if leniency were not shown.
41 Looking at the delay and its consequences in this case, it is now four years and four months since the first of these offences, and almost three years 11 months since the last of them. Your connection with these offences was not known until more than a year and a half after the first of them, as it was not until your DNA profile had been taken and reached the state's database that you were linked to those crimes. It seems that you were first contacted by about them by police in November 2012. I accept that since then you will have had them hanging over you, which has no doubt been a source of concern and stress for you.
42 Further, although the committal hearing was delayed to await formal DNA reports and you did not immediately plead guilty after committal to this court, I accept that for most of the 20 months since you were charged, the delay has not been your fault, and anyway you will have been living with the strain of uncertainty about the result of these charges.
43 I also accept that during much of the intervening period, you have been taking steps to address the causes of your offending. It cannot, however, be said that your progress has been unblemished or only positive.
44 When I last sentenced you, I understood that you had acknowledged both your guilt for the initial offences and the need to address your problems to avoid any recurrence. You had taken the steps through your GP of seeking referral to a psychiatrist, and had been seeing Dr Maloney for almost a year. You had also undergone some psychological counselling. You had established a better rapport with your wife through admitting your substance abuse, and also psychological problems, and she had been encouraged by Dr Maloney's initial diagnosis and recommendations for treatment. She was prepared to try to support you through steps to address your problems. However she had given you an ultimatum against further abuse of alcohol or drugs, and you apparently did relapse into their use. Dr Maloney said you had had more than one such relapse. It seems clear, even from your father's evidence, that you were using drugs again for at least a couple of months before your wife left. The timing may be connected with the committal hearing in June 2011 but I am not able to determine that. You obviously engaged in even further drug abuse when she left. To your credit you sought help and undertook a strict residential rehabilitation program followed by about two more months with some supervision.
45 You have also obtained employment, working again with your father as you first did after leaving school. Living back with your parents now is probably not easy. I take it as an indication that you have been prepared to acknowledge to yourself and to them, that you need help and support, and that you have a longstanding drug and alcohol problem.
46 You deserve credit in the way of leniency for having taken the steps you have since these offences occurred, both those initially in 2011, although there was one further incident of offending that occurred after those steps commenced, and then again in the latter months of 2013 after your significant relapse. I recognise that it is not unusual for people with longstanding addictions to not succeed in remaining abstinent on their first attempts, and it can be said that you took firm steps to try again after your bad relapse in August last year.
47 In the meantime, you have also completed the CCO which I imposed, including the unpaid community work, and attended what I am told was one assessment for drug and alcohol treatment and one session of anger management, being the limited assessments or programs to which you were directed on that order. You deserve credit for completing the CCO after you had been told you would be charged with these further offences. You also were subject to a suspended sentence until June this year.
48 The current offences all occurred before I last sentenced you, so do not constitute breaches of either the CCO or suspended sentence, and the prosecution has confirmed that there are no offences alleged to have occurred to breach either of those orders. That is to your credit also, although I do note that technically the methyl amphetamines which you admit taking, at least to great excess by August 2013, were illegal for you to possess or use. That is not to say that there has been any formal breach of my sentencing orders, and in particular, there has been no subsequent offending in the nature of armed robbery or burglary or theft. However, it cannot be said that your rehabilitation has been unblemished during the delay since these offences occurred.
49 It is further submitted on your behalf that it would not be in the public interest to interrupt your rehabilitation as it now stands. I accept, as I have already said, that there is a strong public interest in the rehabilitation of any offender, and that you have taken the considerable steps I have already outlined, to recognise and work towards your own rehabilitation. That will carry some weight, but needs to be weighed with other sentencing factors.
50 I also take into account that committing these offences under the influence of drugs or alcohol or both, could only be mitigatory in quite exceptional circumstances. What is mitigatory is the steps you have taken to try to avoid getting so drunk or drug affected again as to risk similar misconduct.
51 A Court of Appeal decision since I last sentenced you, Johnson v. R (10 December 2013), made it clear that where a person's mental state is affected by voluntary drug taking, it will only constitute a mitigatory factor in the rare circumstances where it is established that the offender did not have any foreknowledge of the mental state that would be induced by the taking of drugs. Further, the court said that where an offender suffers from a mental disorder, the disorder is not to be treated as a mitigatory factor because it explains the offender's recourse to drugs ( Redlich JA at paragraph 15).
52 From my understanding of Dr Maloney's evidence, it is the recourse to binge drinking or taking ice which he attributes to the psychological conditions he has diagnosed. I do not understand him to say that either depression and anxiety, or the borderline personality disorder which he says is disempowering and disabling, were caused by your drug or alcohol abuse. Nor does he say that they directly contributed to your commission of these offences in any way that decreased your moral culpability for them, that is, that decreased your blameworthiness for them.
53 You claim no memory afterwards of the events, so there is nothing known of what mental state or thoughts you had at the time. You must however, have known that you had no memory after indulging from time to time in binges of alcohol or drug abuse. Therefore, there is nothing to indicate that when committing any of the offences for which I am now sentencing you, you did so due to a mental state that you were unaware could result from the use of drugs you had been taking since teenage, or any excess consumption of alcohol on those nights.
54 I am therefore not satisfied that you fall into the rare and exceptional category of cases where the commission of offences under the influence of drugs or alcohol could be mitigatory. Further, and in light of the clarification from Johnson's case that the indirect contribution of an underlying mental condition through causing resort to alcohol or drugs, is not to be treated as a mitigatory factor, those underlying conditions would not lower your moral culpability on the charges for which I sentence you.
55 I am therefore not satisfied that any of the so-called Verdant principles lowering your moral culpability have been proven to apply in this case.
56 The revelation that you have committed these offences, which was not known at the time of your previous sentencing, raises several concerns.
57 First, the incident the subject of charges 3 and 4, that is the breaking into the pizza shop, was less than a week after you had presented yourself at a police station to admit that it was you shown in a Crime Stoppers picture from CCTV in relation to one of the 3 February 2011 offences. When I sentenced you two years ago, I accepted that action, that is identifying yourself in the photo to police, as reflecting exceptionally genuine remorse and acknowledgement of responsibility for your actions under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
58 It seems that your remorse or sense of responsibility did not survive the week. Even if you committed the offence at the pizza shop under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol, about which there is no actual evidence, you relapsed into substance abuse only days after apparently confessing and acknowledging that when under the influence of alcohol or drugs you had committed serious offences. It could not be argued that you did not know the possible consequences of reverting to such substance abuse when you committed the offences under charges 3 and 4.
59 I accepted previously that finding yourself in the Crime Stoppers photo and realising what you had done on 3 February 2011 without recalling it, and then confessing it to your wife, had all been a salutary lesson that had brought you to the point of confronting the depths to which your drinking and drug abuse had taken you, and to resolving to stop such substance abuse.
60 The next aspect of concern is that when I sentenced you two years ago for the two offences which occurred on the same day, the information then available supported the submissions that these truly were out of character for you. You were in your early 30s with no relevant prior offending. It is now evident that you committed a third similar armed robbery within two weeks of those for which I sentenced you, and another two months later. It is extremely unlikely that I would have entertained a non custodial sentence if I had known of those two further armed robberies, as four separate incidents over a two month period would have posed a quite different picture.
61 Taking into account the consequences of the delay in hearing these charges since they occurred therefore, although I regard them as attracting considerable leniency, they must be weighed against what else has emerged about your overall conduct, offending and reversion to drug or alcohol abuse.
62 Taking all of these considerations into account, I am not satisfied that the mitigatory factors reach the point where adequate punishment would be achieved without imprisonment. I consider that the need for general deterrence is high, and some specific deterrence also.
63 Further, although the timing of these offences means that strictly a suspended sentence would be available, I am not persuaded that exceptional circumstances exist to warrant a wholly suspended sentence in the interests of justice for what were two offences that come within the definition of "serious offences" and would need exceptional circumstances under s.27(2)(B) of the Sentencing Act for a wholly suspended sentence.
64 In my view, the totality of the offending is such that neither the rehabilitative steps taken nor the other effects of the delay since the offences occurred, make any sentence other than one requiring some immediate imprisonment appropriate.
65 I have taken into account a number of considerations of totality - that is, what overall total sentencing is appropriate for the total of the offences you committed in 2011.
66 Charge 1 in particular, but also Charge 2 here, are of similar nature and committed over approximately the same time period as the two offences for which I sentenced you two years ago. If I had known of these at the same time, it is extremely unlikely that I would have imposed the sentences I did, but there would have been considerable concurrency in the sentences to take into account the similarity and totality of the offending at that time. I therefore take into account that you did satisfactorily complete both the CCO and the suspended sentence I imposed. For that reason I consider that there should be a modest degree of moderation in the total effective sentence I impose for the current four charges, so as to take into account that your punishment for those earlier charges would have been substantially although not entirely concurrent with the sentences for the present charges.
67 As for the totality of the charges for which I now sentence you, I consider that there should be some cumulation to reflect that each was committed some months apart and against different people. The degree of cumulation for Charge 3 of burglary may seem disproportionately high when looking at that incident objectively in isolation, but I impose cumulation for that to reflect my view as already explained, that the commission of that offence, even though not involving the threat of violence against any person, was made more serious by its timing in that it was committed less than a week after your having confessed your involvement to police in the 3 February 2011 incidents, and also after you had acknowledged your need for treatment for both mental health and drug and alcohol problems and commenced it.
68 I have considerably moderated the length of the terms and of the non parole period I am going to impose to take into account not only your pleas of guilty, but also the delay since the offences were committed, and the rehabilitation progress that you have made.
69 Would you stand up now please, Mr Esposito.
70 Mario Esposito, on each of the charges you are convicted and sentenced as follows:
71 On Charge 1 of armed robbery, 15 months imprisonment; on Charge 2 of armed robbery, 16 months imprisonment, that is the base sentence; on Charge 3 of burglary, six months imprisonment; on Charge 4 of theft, one month imprisonment.
72 I direct that two months of the sentences on each of charges 1 and 3 be served cumulatively on each other, and on the sentence on Charge 2. The balance of the sentences will be served concurrently by operation of law. That means a total effective sentence of 20 months imprisonment.
73 I fix a non parole period of 10 months.
74 I state for the purposes of s.6AAA that if you had not pleaded guilty to these charges but had been found guilty of them by a jury, but still applying considerable leniency for all of the other mitigatory factors, and allowing for totality with the completed sentences on the previous two charges, I would have imposed a total effective sentence of two years nine months with non parole period of 22 months.
75 In addition, I make the three compensation orders sought. They were for $300 in respect of the first offence, $400 in respect of the second, and $30 in respect of the theft which is Charge 4, and there was also a disposal order for the items used as offensive threatening weapons.
76 I have signed those orders and copies will be provided to your lawyers.
77 Take a seat for a moment, Mr Esposito.
78 HER HONOUR: Does the arithmetic work, first of all?
79 MS PEARSON: Yes, Your Honour.
80 HER HONOUR: Have I omitted anything that needs to be ordered?
81 MS PEARSON: It's all there, Your Honour.
82 MR HANDS: Thank you, Your Honour.
83 HER HONOUR: All right. I have a part heard trial so I can't really leave you time to speak to your client in court Mr Hands. I would have otherwise, but I have to leave the Bench and let the next matter set up.
84 MR HANDS: Yes, Your Honour, thank you, Your Honour.
85 HER HONOUR: Yes. Do you wish me to make any custody notes? I think it's your client's first time in custody?
86 MR HANDS: It is, and I would like the psychiatrist nurse to have a look at him. I think they do anyway.
87 HER HONOUR: I think there's an assessment done but I will put a note that it's your client's first time in custody. There are the reports of Dr Maloney.
88 MR HANDS: If they could be attached to the manifest.
89 HER HONOUR: If you want, it's up to you whether you want them provided at the outset. They get provided in due course.
90 MR HANDS: Yes, Your Honour, I think - - -
91 HER HONOUR: But it's a question of privacy and that's up to you, your client.
92 MR HANDS: Can I just approach the dock?
93 HER HONOUR: Yes.
94 MR HANDS: I appreciate that, Your Honour, if a report could be attached to the - - -
95 HER HONOUR: I think it still gets attached at this stage. There's a different process now, but my notes said Dr Maloney said your client's currently prescribed Lexapro.
96 MR HANDS: Yes.
97 HER HONOUR: I wasn't sure if there was anything else. I couldn't - the way I scribbled, I wasn't sure.
98 MR HANDS: No, there's nothing else.
99 HER HONOUR: He'll be asked about medications of course, straight away.
100 MR HANDS: The first time they always keep an eye on him. Yes, thank you, Your Honour.
101 HER HONOUR: Yes. All right, can Mr Esposito be removed from the court, please, and the documentation will be provided - be taken into custody and documentation will be provided shortly.
102 PRISONER REMOVED
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