Director of Public Prosecutions v Ford
[2024] VSC 797
•19 December 2024
| IN THE SUPREME COURT OF VICTORIA | Not Restricted |
AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL DIVISION
S ECR 2023 0275
| DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS | Crown |
| v | |
| ANTHONY FORD | Accused |
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JUDGE: | Incerti J |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne |
DATE OF HEARING: | 13 December 2024 |
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 19 December 2024 |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | DPP v Ford |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2024] VSC 797 |
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CRIMINAL LAW – Sentencing – Manslaughter – Unlawful and dangerous act – Victim was friend of accused’s former partner – Stabbing – Criminal history – Early guilty plea – Family violence.
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APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the Crown | For plea: Ms A Moran For sentence: Mr J Lewis SC | Office of Public Prosecutions |
| For the Accused | Mr D Cronin | Papa Hughes Lawyers |
HER HONOUR:
Anthony Ford, you have pleaded guilty to a single charge of manslaughter in relation to the death of Benjamin Singleton.
The maximum penalty for this offence is 25 years’ imprisonment.
Manslaughter is a Category 2 offence under the Sentencing Act 1991 (‘the Act’),[1] requiring the Court to impose a custodial order unless one of the exceptions set out in the Act applies. None of those circumstances are relevant here.
[1]The Act, s 5(2H).
Circumstances of the offending.
Your offending occurred on 13 August 2023 at the Seasons 5 Resort and Spa in Point Cook. You had spent several days at this resort, visiting your former partner and your three very young children who had arrived there on 11 August 2023. This contact was in breach of multiple intervention orders protecting your former partner and the children.
It is clear that tensions were high between you and your former partner at this time and multiple friends reported that you were stressed and anxious. This included an argument between you and your former partner on the morning of 13 August about where she had spent the previous night.
Shortly after noon on that day, Benjamin Singleton (‘the deceased’) attempted to call your partner and followed this call with a text message requesting drugs. Not long after 1pm, the deceased and his girlfriend, Bianca Burt, arrived at the resort to check on your partner’s welfare and to obtain illicit substances. They did not know you were present and left shortly afterwards to collect drugs from St Albans.
The pair returned to the resort at around 2:30pm and went into the unit. Upon learning that you were present, the deceased opted to wait outside at his car. At around 2:35pm, Ms Burt and your former partner came outside to have a cigarette.
After finishing her cigarette, Ms Burt joined the deceased at the car. Around this time, you were making plans to leave the unit. You were walking out of the unit when you saw the deceased and angrily approached him. You went right up to the deceased and asked, ‘How was my kid’s birthday party?’, a reference to the birthday party of one of your children days earlier to which you were not invited and could not attend.
The deceased exclaimed that they ‘just went for dinner to a restaurant’ and then grabbed you by the shoulders and pushed you backwards. The two of you locked arms and began pushing each other. At some point you both fell to the ground and continued wrestling.
During this struggle, you pulled a knife from your pocket and stabbed the deceased multiple times. You then got up and walked away from the scene. Moments later, you were seen running through the carpark. You continued to run through a nearby reserve and residential streets of Point Cook, discarding the knife, your backpack and your jumper along the way. You took steps to disguise your appearance by putting on a hat and sunglasses and attempted to cover your blood-stained jeans with a vest. Nevertheless, you were picked up by police shortly afterwards.
Meanwhile, the deceased had got to his feet and managed to take ten steps before collapsing. Multiple calls were made to emergency services, and ambulance staff arrived within 20 minutes. Attempts were made to control the bleeding and resuscitate the deceased but proved unsuccessful. Tragically, he was declared dead at 3:42pm. A post-mortem examination revealed that two of the stab wounds had perforated the deceased’s heart and a further stab wound had perforated his spleen.
Victim impact statements
Before I continue, I want to say something about the effect your offending has had on Mr Singleton’s family.
Benjamin Singleton, known to his loved ones as Ben, was only 35 years old at the time of his death. His de facto partner, Ms Burt, was pregnant at the time of his death and now raises their one year old child, Ryan.
A victim impact statement from Ms Burt was read in Court. She held Ben in her arms as he died. It was her birthday that day and they were due to find out the sex of their child just two days later. She thinks about Ben’s death every day and has not slept properly since. She fears that nothing will be good again now that she has lost her ‘gentle giant’.
The Court also received victim impact statements from Ben’s father, Geoff Singleton, sister, Tammy Brown, and nephew, Frazer O’Gorman. The statements were not read out at the plea hearing. As such, I do not propose to discuss their contents in open court. However, it is clear that Ben’s death has had a tremendous and lasting impact on each of them.
There are no words that can express the pain that those close to the deceased are experiencing. This sentence cannot seek to address their grief. It is clear that Mr Singleton was a very special human being who was well loved by his family. I have taken each of the victim impact statements into account in determining the appropriate sentence for you.
Personal circumstances
I now turn to your personal circumstances.
You were born on 31 May 1995 and grew up in Werribee. You are the middle of three children.
You attended a series of local schools until the age of 16, when you left to work with your father. You worked as a pick-packer for a fencing company for three years and then undertook a plumbing apprenticeship. In the three years prior to this offending, you had worked as a contract truck cleaner. The Court was assisted by a reference letter from your most recent employer indicating that he will have work available to you upon your eventual release.
Your life has been somewhat characterised by drug and alcohol use, commencing at the age of 13. You used alcohol, cannabis, ecstasy and speed through your teens. Methylamphetamine and GHB became an ongoing problem for you from the age of 20 and this had a very negative impact on you.
One such impact was on your personal relationships. You met your most recent partner through drug associates and have three children with her. They were all aged under three at the time of your offending. This relationship involved substantial drug use and, as I mentioned above, was characterised by multiple intervention orders protecting your partner and the children from you.
You drug use was further exacerbated by a number of tragic events over the past decade, including the deaths of multiple friends and an incident where you were threatened with a spear gun.
Criminal history
You have a relevant, albeit limited, criminal history. You have previously been convicted and fined for possessing a controlled weapon and also received a bond with no conviction for prior similar offending. Your only other violent offending was for assaulting police in 2016. This is your first time in prison.
Nature and gravity of the offence
Your offending is objectively serious. You incited a verbal altercation with the deceased and drastically escalated the scuffle that ensued by drawing and fatally using a knife. Although I accept that you were not the first to resort to physical violence in the fight, you aggressively approached the deceased and brought about the circumstances that led to his ultimate demise.
It is important to recognise the role that family violence played in these circumstances. Although the offending was not directly against your former partner, the situation arose because you were in breach of an intervention order. Part of the conflict in your relationship was your jealousy about a lack of attention from your former partner and concerns about other men in her life. The fact that you breached this intervention order and this very conduct sparked the altercation with the deceased contributes to the gravity of the offending. I accept that the deceased was the first to physically retaliate when he pushed you. Your offending was not planned or premeditated.
I reject the submission that you were not armed when you first approached the deceased. While you did not brandish the weapon on approach, you had the knife on you and within easy enough reach to draw it in the course of a struggle on the ground. Onlookers reported that the knife was curved and clearly not a kitchen knife. You had a vicious weapon in your pocket, and you were ready and willing to use it, stabbing Mr Singleton three times.
By your plea of guilty to manslaughter, you accept that you engaged in a dangerous act that caused the death of the deceased. You did not intend to kill him. Nevertheless, I consider this a moderate example of manslaughter. You instigated the altercation, even by just your words, knowing you had a weapon, and the results speak for themselves. You left the scene and did not attempt to provide assistance to the deceased. Instead, you made poor attempts to discard some personal effects and to disguise your appearance.
I consider that your culpability for this offending is also in the mid-range.
Comparable cases
I have received a table of comparable cases from the defence and the prosecution and I have had regard to those cases and the current sentencing statistics.
Sentencing factors
Guilty plea and remorse
You offered to plead guilty on 20 October 2023. This represents a very early plea and you are entitled to a sentencing discount on that basis. Your plea serves a utilitarian purpose and saves the witnesses and the family of the deceased from a lengthy and potentially traumatising trial.
I accept that your expressions of remorse and early plea reflect some level of genuine remorse for your offending. Your family and friends have also indicated in their support letters that this experience has had a profound impact upon you and you are deeply troubled by your actions. I note the prosecution submission that these expressions are limited in their value. However, along with the very early plea, I consider that remorse is demonstrated on the balance of probabilities.
Age and rehabilitation prospects
Although you are well beyond the age of a young offender, your age remains an important factor in your sentence. You are only 29 years old, and there is plenty of time for you to turn your life around.
I am told that you are employed in the induction billet of the factory at Port Phillip Prison and that you have engaged in a first aid course, a certificate III in warehousing and Alcohol and Drug courses. You are exercising regularly and you have remained drug-free while on remand. This is no small achievement given you have been in custody for over 15 months. Continuing on this path to recovery is an important protective factor for you.
I have received a letter from your parents and they continue to be very supportive of you. There is work available to you when you are released.
Perhaps most importantly, you have three young children. Your recovery from substance abuse is crucial to having any sort of relationship with your children. If that is not a motivating factor, I am not sure what could be. At the same time, your propensity for family violence and the role that your jealousy towards your partner played in your offending must leave me somewhat guarded about your prospects of rehabilitation.
Taking this into account, and provided that you continue to address your struggles with addiction, I consider that your prospects of rehabilitation are reasonable.
Hardship in custody
You were initially charged with murder and I accept that this burden would have made your initial period in custody more onerous.
Parsimony
The Act relevantly provides that ‘a court must not impose a sentence that is more severe than that which is necessary to achieve the purpose for which the sentence is imposed’.[2] This reflects the common law principle of parsimony. I have applied this provision when considering the appropriate sentence in this case.
[2]The Act, s 5(3).
Sentencing Purposes
I now turn to the purposes of sentencing.
The only purposes for which sentence may be imposed are general and specific deterrence, denunciation, protection of the community, just punishment and rehabilitation.[3]
[3]The Act, s 5(1).
I consider that specific deterrence has a significant role to play in your sentence. You allowed the turmoil within your relationship, which is itself a concern, to spill out and rob an innocent man of his life. You must learn to control your anger and to not resort to aggression or violence.
General deterrence also has a role. You chose to carry a knife on you. Victoria is plagued by senseless knife crimes and it is totally unnecessary. The community needs to learn that pulling a weapon, whether it is a hunting knife or a kitchen knife, is not acceptable and has dire consequences for all involved. This also represents community denunciation of your actions.
Sentence
Mr Ford, would you please stand.
Balancing, as best I am able, the competing considerations laid down in the Act and having regard to the matters I have just discussed, for the offence of manslaughter, I sentence you to imprisonment for eight-and-a-half years.
Considering the desirability of giving you a lengthy parole period, I order that you serve five years before becoming eligible for parole.
I declare that but for your plea of guilty, I would have sentenced you to 10-and-a-half years’ imprisonment with a non-parole period of seven years.[4]
[4]I have imposed a less severe sentence than I otherwise would have because Mr Ford pleaded guilty to this offence and I make this declaration pursuant to s 6AAA of the Act.
I further declare that you have served 494 days of pre-sentence detention, not including this day.
Further orders
I will also make the disposal orders sought.
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