Director of Public Prosecutions v Hughes
[2023] VCC 1867
•16 October 2023
| IN THE COUNTY COURT OF VICTORIA | Revised Not Restricted Suitable for Publication |
AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL JURISDICTION
CR-22-00653
| DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS |
| v |
| COREY HUGHES |
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JUDGE: | HIS HONOUR JUDGE MAIDMENT |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne |
DATE OF HEARING: | 3 October 2023 |
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 16 October 2023 |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | DPP v Hughes |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2023] VCC 1867 |
REASONS FOR SENTENCE
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Subject:Plea - sentencing
Catchwords: Intentionally causing serious injury – affray – kidnapping - driving whilst disqualified
Legislation Cited:
Cases Cited:Bugmy v The Queen [2013] HCA 37
Sentence:4 years and 6 months' imprisonment, 2 years and 9 months non-parole period
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APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the Director of Public Prosecutions | Mr A. Albert | Office of Public Prosecutions |
For the Accused | Mr L. Barker | Nelson Brown Legal |
HIS HONOUR:
1Corey Hughes, you have pleaded guilty to an offence of intentionally causing serious injury, for which the maximum penalty is imprisonment for 20 years; to an offence of affray, for which the maximum penalty is imprisonment for five years; and to an offence of kidnapping, for which the maximum penalty is imprisonment for 25 years.
2You have also asked me to take into account and have pleaded guilty to a related summary offence of driving whilst disqualified, for which the maximum penalty is imprisonment for two years.
3You have admitted a prior criminal record which is quite substantial and goes back to April of 2014, when you appeared in the Dandenong Children's Court.
4It is apparent from your record that you have had a serious drug problem for a number of years and were given the opportunity of dealing with that through the Drug Court. Unfortunately it seems that, as a result of a friend of yours being killed, you relapsed during the period when you were subject to the Drug Court Order.
5The prosecution has tendered and relied upon a summary of prosecution opening on the plea (Exhibit A) and I will summarise it briefly.
6On 19 March 2021 you, along with a female friend and your father, determined upon attacking your victim by ambushing him at a shopping centre car park at Golf Links Road on the Frankston Flinders Road.
7You arrived there at about 8.40 am with your two co-accused: your then girlfriend Cumming and your father Persoons.
8Your victim was already at the car park. You and your father got out of the car. You were carrying a small baseball bat. You ran at and caught your victim quickly. You assaulted him with the baseball bat, hitting him a number of times and causing him to bleed from the head.
9A bystander urged you to stop hitting your victim but you and your father dragged him into the vehicle that was being driven by Cumming.
10The bystander told you to back off and leave your victim alone. Your response was to threaten the bystander with the bat and to tell him to 'Fuck off it's none of your business'.
11Your victim told the bystander 'No cops please, no cops'. He was pushed into the back seat of the vehicle and you and your father sat either side of him. You then assaulted him by hitting him in the head several times with the handle of the bat.
12Your victim was taken back to Persoons' address in Cranbourne East. He was apparently unconscious at that stage but was awoken by an unidentified male hitting him in the head. He ran to the bathroom and vomited and fell asleep. He woke up later that day, found his mobile phone and walked out of the premises.
13He returned to an address where his girlfriend was. She drove him to an after-hours medical clinic, but your victim told the doctor in attendance that he would not go to hospital.
14He then went home to his girlfriend's house and stayed in bed until 2 pm on 23 March, when police attended and took him to the Eastern Health Hospital by ambulance. He was transferred to the Alfred Hospital, where it was concluded that he had an acquired brain injury, fractured skull, bleeding on the brain, bruising to the right frontal lobe of the brain, air in his cranial cavity, a forehead scalp wound with tenderness over his right temple, forehead and upper cervical spine, tenderness on the right chest wall, loss of consciousness, nausea, vomiting, headache and painful sensitivity of eyes to light.
15The injuries have resulted in ongoing consequences that have required rehabilitation therapy. These include memory impairment, sleep difficulties, poor vision, eye pain that required him to stay in darkened rooms and wear an eye patch covering the right eye, severe headaches, anxiety, a stutter so severe that he lost his ability to speak and communicated by typing on an application on his phone.
16In November 2021 a forensic medical practitioner expressed his opinion that:
“6 months following the head injury, his symptoms - eye pain, stutter, memory difficulties and mood changes remained disabling. The prospect of a full recovery to a pre-injury state in the near future was doubtful.”[1]
[1] Summary of Prosecution Opening on Plea, paragraph 21
17It is noteworthy that at the committal hearing in April 2022 your victim gave evidence by typing on an application on his phone. He apparently still has to communicate in that way.
18You were interviewed by police and initially made no comment. What you said to police was far short of a full and frank confession to your criminal activity.
19There is no victim impact statement, but I think I have adequately identified the consequences of your conduct to your victim from the prosecution opening.
20Turning to matters personal to you. Your counsel provided me with written submissions dated 2 August 2022 which were supplemented by oral submissions. It is plain from these submissions and from the other materials with which I was provided that you had a very difficult upbringing. You are of Aboriginal origin, and you had a childhood that was characterised by neglect and abuse. You were substantially brought up by your paternal grandmother, your father's mother, and subjected to adverse influences from your father and from other negative peers during your upbringing.
21You did not do well at school; however you showed extraordinary promise as a sportsman, particularly in ice hockey. However, it seems that from the age of about 16, negative peers and your father led you to focus more on drug abuse than on your sporting activities. As a result your life deteriorated significantly.
22It is to be noted that you suffered a serious motor vehicle accident aged seven and that you were seriously injured during the course of that incident.
23In addition to the outline of submissions, I was provided with copies of a letter from your grandmother dated 9 February 2022, supplemented by a further letter from her dated 20 September 2023, a letter from the mother of your young son dated 20 June 2022, a letter from a friend by the name of Michael Harrington, and a letter from a Simon Gathoni. I was also provided with a report from the Royal Children's Hospital dealing with your injuries arising from the motor vehicle accident to which I have already referred.
24I was provided with a psychological report from Naomi Cameron dated 27 February 2023, which deals in quite significant detail with your deprived upbringing and the effects that the deprived upbringing was likely to have had upon your psychological emotional development, underpinning some of the mental impairments from which you appear to be suffering presently. It is an informative report and useful in identifying features that have been relied upon in mitigation. It also supports the submission that the principles arising from the well‑known case of Bugmy[2] are relevant in this particular case.
[2]Bugmy v The Queen [2013] HCA 37
25I was provided with some certificates showing your participation in courses underpinning your desire to rehabilitate yourself, along with some urinalysis showing that you have not been involved in illicit drug-taking whilst in custody. I was also provided with a letter from Simon Fenech of Fruit2Work dated 2 October 2023.
26Your counsel frankly accepted on your behalf that a sentence of imprisonment was the only option available to me in sentencing, given your criminal record and given the serious nature of the offending. He did not shrink from accepting that the offending was serious, and he sought a sentence indication. I have given one what seems to me is a fair one, particularly giving effect to the application of the Bugmy principles.
27Your prospects of rehabilitation are very much in your hands. You are a very talented sportsman, and if you can shake the drug habit and get yourself back into fitness and build on that you have some reasonable prospects of rehabilitation. Unfortunately, I cannot put your prospects that high at the present time.
28I give you full credit for your still relatively young age and that the offending occurred when you were 22 years of age. These were very serious offences. That is a factor that I need to consider carefully, and particularly since you come from a very deprived upbringing.
29You are fortunate that you have a grandmother who has loved you, been a mother figure for you over the years and still offers her support. You have responsibilities to a young child, which I understand is a source of hope and expectation for you in terms of living up to your responsibilities as a father. You have never met your young son. But I hope that you live up to your present intentions of doing what you can to make a substantial and worthwhile contribution to his upbringing.
30I give you full credit for your pleas of guilty. I understand that it would have been difficult to contemplate the significant term of imprisonment that you were having to face as a result of pleading guilty to these offences. I think it shows courage that you have done so. Your pleas are consistent with remorse and I hope that remorse is genuine and will in future make you hesitate before you engage in conduct of that kind.
31You pleaded guilty to a very serious offence of intentionally causing serious injury. It may be that you did not foresee the full consequences of what you were doing at the time, but your intention was to cause a serious injury, and clearly you have done so. The consequences to the victim have been life-changing. That will be something that will be on your conscience for the rest of your life and will make you hesitate again before you engage in conduct of that kind.
32Drugs are the real bugbear. You have to beat that habit somehow and make whatever use you can of the non-parole period that I have indicated that I would impose upon you and work as hard as you can towards persuading the Parole Board to grant you parole. That is not necessarily an easy thing when you have a history of violence, and you have engaged in such serious violence as this offending demonstrates.
33However, there has been a considerable delay. You were in custody during the period of some of the harsher regimes of the COVID pandemic and the deprivation of privileges that that entailed. You are to be given full credit for that and I have endeavoured to factor that in a meaningful way in the sentence that I have indicated.
34Your youth has to be tempered against the serious nature of the offending, but I think with the application of the Bugmy principles there is a moderation of your moral culpability which I think is appropriate. That said, there is a need to give proper weight to protection of the community. Your criminal record underscores the need for that and hence the necessity for imposing the term of imprisonment that I have indicated I will be imposing.
35The delay with this matter hanging over your head for a very significant period of time has not assisted you in dealing with your period on remand and I take that into account. The fact that you could have put your hand up earlier in the piece is obviously a factor, but nevertheless the delay is still relevant.
36As I have indicated, doing the best I can to work out a sentence that pays proper regard to the need to denounce this very serious offending, to punish you adequately, to deter others from committing offences of this kind and to deter you in the future, as well as giving consideration to the need for your rehabilitation to proceed once you are released from prison in the hope that that might provide some longer term protection for the community, I now proceed to impose sentence upon you reflecting the sentence indication that I have given.
37Corey Hughes, for the offence of intentionally causing serious injury the subject of Charge 1, you are convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for a period of 4 years.
38On Charge 2 of affray, you are convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for a period of 1 year.
39On Charge 3 of kidnapping, you are convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for a period of 2 years.
40On the related summary offence of driving whilst disqualified you are convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for a period of 2 months and I disqualify you from driving or holding or obtaining a driver's licence for a period of 12 months from today.
41I order that 1 month of the sentence on Charge 2 and 5 months of the sentence on Charge 3 be served cumulatively upon one another and upon the sentence of 4 years on Charge 1, making a total effective sentence of 4 years 6 months' imprisonment.
42I fix a non-parole period of 2 years 9 months.
43I declare 723 days of pre-sentence detention as time to be deducted from the term of imprisonment that I have imposed.
44But for your pleas of guilty, I would have sentenced you to imprisonment for a period of 6 years and 6 months with a non-parole period of 4 years and 4 months.
45Are there any other orders that I need make, counsel?
46MR ALBERT: I don't believe so, Your Honour.
47MR BARKER: No, Your Honour.
48HIS HONOUR: I thank counsel for assistance.
49MR ALBERT: The court pleases.
50MR BARKER: Your Honour pleases.
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