Director of Public Prosecutions v Jones

[2019] VCC 1754

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

AT LATROBE VALLEY
CRIMINAL JURISDICTION

CR-19-00934

DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS

v

JEREMY JONES

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JUDGE:	HIS HONOUR JUDGE SMALLWOOD
WHERE HELD:	Latrobe Valley
DATE OF HEARING:	24 October 2019
DATE OF SENTENCE:	25 October 2019
CASE MAY BE CITED AS:	DPP v JONES
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION:	[2019] VCC 1754

REASONS FOR SENTENCE
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Subject:
Catchwords:
Legislation Cited:
Cases Cited:
Sentence:

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APPEARANCES:	Counsel	Solicitors
For the Office of Public Prosecutions	Mr R. Hammill	Office of Public Prosecutions
For the Accused	Mr L. Dogger	Daniel Taylor Lawyers

HIS HONOUR:

1Jeremy Jones, you have pleaded guilty to one charge of aggravated burglary and one charge of causing injury recklessly, as well as one uplifted summary matter of effectively trespass.  Aggravated burglary carries 25 years, causing an injury recklessly carries five years.  You are now 37 years of age.  You have pleaded guilty at the earliest reasonable opportunity and made admissions during the course of your record of interview, which would have been essential to the Crown in obtaining a conviction in this matter.  The antecedents of the complainant are such that I would have thought a jury would have a great deal of difficulty accepting any version of events that he gave. Had you gone into the police station and said self-defence, I doubt we would even be here. 

2Be that as it may, your plea of guilty is accompanied by appropriate remorse and in the circumstances, laudable remorse.  You must also of course get the utilitarian benefit of that plea of guilty.  You have no prior convictions and you have no matters pending.  The circumstances of the offending should be put into a context.  You are one of three children of a relationship between the complainant and your mother.  The complainant has been, for a very long time, a very violent man and would appear to have been a violent man in domestic circumstances, including your particular family.

3His criminal history is that - I am assuming that your parents got together round about the mid-90s, in January of 1995, he was given a suspended sentence for threat to kill, intentional injury, assault, assault with a weapon, possess firearms, possess unregistered firearm and resisting police.  On 2 June 1995, that suspended sentence was breached and it was reinstated for him to serve nine months.  On 11 October 1995, that was set aside and the sentence was further suspended.  On 3 September of 1996, he received 120 days for breaching an intervention order and unlawful assault.  On 6 September 1996, another six months on charges of breaching the intervention order, resist police, intentionally recklessly cause injury and threat to inflict serious injury. 

4It was some time not long after that, after he had done that twelve months, as I understand it, that your parents separated.  He then has subsequent matters regarding assaults for which he received, it would appear, a community corrections order.  The informant in the matter has provided a summary of those court appearances.  It is clear that the court appearances on 6 September 1996 and 3 September 1996, 16 January 1995, all relate to assaults and very violent assaults indeed on your mother.

5For example, the matter on 6 September 1996, she awoke and saw him standing over her.  An argument took place.  He put a knife to her throat and threatened to rip her throat out.  They both struggled.  She ran from the house and called the police.  The children were all in the house.  That is simply an example.  The matter in 2005 relates to an assault on a different partner,
11 January 2005, relates again to a different partner, but all involving assaults on women in domestic circumstances.

6The statements that have been made by your sister and indeed in your record of interview, outline some detail the violent trauma that was inflicted upon you and your siblings and your mother by the complainant.  Your sister Leah says that she, as do you, has been diagnosed with a post-traumatic stress disorder and I am very surprised the other sister has not as well.  She says:

'I've witnessed my father assault my mother Katherine Lesley Goodman on countless occasions, including holding knives to her throat, holding guns to her head, slapping and punching her, throwing plates of food at her, dragging her by her hair, arms and legs.  I remember my mother running down the road of where we would be living, to get away from him, usually without time to put on her shoes.  My mother would often hide in my room that Jeremy and I shared to escape Anthony.  We would be begging for him to leave her alone when he eventually came into the room.  Jeremy would have witnessed all this as well.

I have memories of daily abuse and I fear for our safety as a family as a result of the abuse from Anthony James Jones.  I have some major incidents which I remember vividly.  The first of this is when I woke up during the night to yelling from my parents, which is not unusual.  However, I would always go to their room to see what was going on.  On this occasion when I got to their room on this night, our father was holding a gun to my mother's head laughing at her, while she was crying and yelling, at which point I stood between her and the gun to protect my mother.  I was approximately eight years old at that point in time'.

7She goes onto say she remembered it looked like a shotgun.  I note that he does have prior convictions for possessions of just such weapons.  She recalls another incident where he assaulted your mother in the front of your grandmother's house.  Then she goes onto describe other incidents over that time.  She talks about being chased down the street by him holding a gun at the time.  They obtained an emergency shelter in New South Wales.  She recalls an incident of witnessing him holding a large butcher's knife to your mother's throat, threatening to slit it.  She again ran towards him and told him to stop.  When he let go, she then ran for help.

8She believes there has been a number of times where if she had not been there, your father would have killed your mother.  In fact, handovers after the separation had to be done at the Morwell police station, due to the violence of the complainant in this matter.  She has suffered a great deal of trauma and believes that you would be no different to her.  The psychological material has been tendered on your behalf tends to confirm that. She says:

I have witnessed my father bully and torment Jeremy until he is screaming for him to stop. Our father would regularly hang Jeremy from a door knob by his clothing until he was crying begging to be taken down. This happened at our home in Nar Nar Goon when Jeremy was approximately 8 years old. Our father would then turn all the lights off and pretend to go to bed as to imply he would leave Jeremy hanging there all night.

9Not only was his violence inflicted during the course of your childhood, but you at one stage lived with your father for a couple of years after the separation, him having convinced you that you should not live with your mother.  There is a bit of confusion about dates with all that, but essentially what it comes down to is you lived with him in the area of Maffra.  Your mother and family then and a step-father, as I understand it, shifted back to Maffra.  Because of all the circumstances, you had virtually no contact with your mother over an extended period of time, over ten years.

10However, in the last five years or so, contact has been renewed and you now get on very well with your mother and your siblings and you have been able to reunite yourselves as a family.  It is clear from the materials before me that even after the separation, his threats continued.  He would ring your sisters and basically threaten them and it has been going on, as I say, for a long time.  The last time he rang and threatened you was apparently about a year before this incident that I am going to describe took place. 

11You were living in Maffra and so was he, in February of 2019.  On 16 February 2019, you attended the Macalister Hotel with friends to celebrate the birth of a friend's baby.  You had been drinking and it was in that situation that you, whilst relatively intoxicated it would appear, (you were not fit to be interviewed) had a conversation with another person about child abuse.  You became agitated.  It is clearly a matter that had been playing on your mind for some time, all your life probably.  You had been receiving some psychological assistance over the preceding year or so. 

12It is important to note I think at this stage, just in terms of the milieu in which all this took place and the level of provocation that you have been subjected to, that your father, the complainant, admitted to police on the day when he made his statement that the night before, that, as I understand it, is the night of 15 February 2019, he attended at your house with the intention of killing you.

13He quite calmly apparently, told police that because the lights were on in his grandson's room, he thought it would not be a good idea to do it in front of him, so he would come back and do it later on.  That is the nature of the victim, if he can be called that, in this particular matter.  In any event, you, with all that trauma in your system, and again I will be referring to the report of the psychologist shortly, in an intoxicated state attended at his house. 

14His version is that you forced your way in and assaulted him.  You have pleaded to that and that I will have to sentence on that basis.  When you spoke to the police, I accept that you were genuine in your record of interview and had very little memory of how it all occurred.  You took fully responsibility for it.  You said that you had attended at the house, that you were intoxicated, that an altercation had occurred, you remember being over the top of him and it was in that circumstances that your wife, if I recall correctly, attended at the premises and was able to break it up.  You left, came back shortly later to get your phone and that is where the trespass charge comes from.

15I have to sentence on the basis that you entered with the intention of assaulting him and knowing that he was there.  I do accept for these purposes that intention to assault was spontaneous, was not premeditated.  Indeed, if you had been going to assault him in this way, I suspect you would have done it a lot earlier than this.  You had had well over twenty years to ruminate on the damage he had done to you and your family.  Your wife heard you yelling at him, 'You ruined my life'.

16When you were interviewed and subsequent to all this, you have made it clear that one of the worst aspects of this for you, is that you spent your whole life trying not to be like your father and then you have gone and done exactly the same thing.  When you had finished assaulting him, there is no other way for me to describe it, him with his criminal history, with his treatment of your family, his violence towards his children and his partners, had the audacity to ring the police. 

17It is a pity, I suspect, that the police were not rung on him on far more often occasions than they actually were.  Not surprisingly, there is no victim impact statement.  That is a summary of the offending and it is my view that it is spontaneous. You have shown over a long period of time a remarkable degree of self-control, bearing in mind that you do have post-traumatic stress disorder and other conditions.   There has been a long series of provocation and in the end, as they say in the Bible, “you reap what you sow” and that is effectively what has occurred here.

18I have already made clear in the course of the plea, my view as to where this should have ended, but the fact it is before the County Court.  Aggravated burglary by definition is a serious offence.  I am well aware of all the authorities that relate to it.  I do not regard this as any sort of vigilante scenario, but again, I am aware of all the authorities in that respect.  On the material before me, I think the likelihood of this being repeated is nil and the denunciation, bearing in mind the nature of the person who was assaulted will be close to nil.  In terms of punishment, there has to be a disposition which reflects the criminality of all this. 

19Each crime that comes before this court has to be treated on its own merits.  I think that any right thinking member of the community would totally understand how this occurred and have an enormous amount of sympathy for you.  I will be going through your personal history in a moment.  It is clearly a situation where I think any Sentencing Judge would be entitled to exercise a significant degree of mercy.  I do not think that that is even required here, but if it was, that is in fact what I would do.

20It is conceded by the Crown that a custodial sentence is not required and it was suggested a community corrections order. As I indicated yesterday, I have taken the view that in these circumstances, an adjourned undertaking, with a significant contribution to a charity would be the appropriate disposition.  I do that for a number of reasons.  One, in my view, your moral culpability in this under such provocation, in such circumstances where you are not only angry about what has happened to you, and you are angry about what has happened to your mother. You are angry about what has happened to your siblings.  It is a low degree of moral culpability.

21Tendered on your behalf was a reference, I will be referring to again in a moment, as well as submissions and a report from psychologist Pamela Matthews.  Pamela Matthews goes through your background and childhood and the violence.  I do not think I need to go through all that, I will simply direct that that psychological report remain on the court file for the detail of all this.  The family eventually dissolved after your father had gone to gaol.  You then, at his insistence it would seem, went and lived with him and it went from there. 

22What is clear from the report is that you do have a number of matters, which I think give rise to the application of Verdins.  Not that I have any intention of incarcerating you, I would not in any event, but again not wishing to go through the entire report, it seems clear that the circumstances in your position are that whilst alcohol played a certain part in it, you have clearly been questioned and asked about it and there has been a discussion about abuse at the hotel in those circumstances.  I think that that is, as Ms Matthews describes, triggered a flood of distressing memories, anger and high levels of physiological and psychological arousal, consistent with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

23She goes onto say that you suffer from intrusive unwanted memories of childhood experiences, up to four times a week.  At times feel like these experiences are reoccurring.  You also described a range of physiological responses in that context, that is just feeling aroused, dizzy or sweaty and psychological responses such as nightmares.  You feel uncomfortable with it and at times, very distressed by talking of your childhood and you avoided contact with your father, to reduce reminders of those events.  She says that it lacked premeditation, I agree entirely with that.  I also accept what you said to her that you did not go around there with the intention of committing the assault that you did, but essentially in all those circumstances, all those factors operating on you, it occurred. 

24You, despite the difficulties associated with your childhood, have done pretty well in life.  You now have children.  You have worked all your life.  You are a qualified plumber.  You have been able to obtain your own house.  You have obviously been a relatively gifted or at least enthusiastic footballer.  You are currently the senior coach of the Cowwarr Football Club.  You have been nominated to be the role of assistant coach for the North Gippsland representative interleague team and the Gippsland Power under 15s football team.  You are the squad coach for Maffra Basketball and you have access to your two children. 

25You have an assessment for alcohol strategies.  You have ongoing appointments with that.  You have completed a course of therapeutic counselling with Intrepidy Counselling.  It is clear to me, and clear to
Ms Matthews who examined you, that you are intelligent, that you have insight into what occurred and that you are truly remorseful for it, in circumstances where I am sure many in your position would just simply be running self-justification, rather than a sense of having done the wrong thing.  Again, I do not think I need to go into all the details of what Ms Matthews has said.  It simply confirms what I have already covered.  She regards you as being low level risk of reoffending and I would think that is right. 

26So far as rehabilitation is concerned, you have, and were before this occurred, seeking psychological treatment.  You have had psychological treatment since then.  You have put yourself in circumstances where these matters can be dealt with.  In those circumstances, I do not see the need for a therapeutic community corrections order, albeit there would have been one without conviction because you have those matters well in hand.  It is a situation where as far as moral culpability is concerned, it is clear that your trauma from your childhood is what brought this whole offending about and clearly level one of Verdins comes into play in that situation.  Also, the decision of Bugmy, in terms of an abusive childhood, of the consequences that can have, I take into account as well. 

27The reference that has been sent by the work colleague, as I am assuming, has known you for a long time, from - excellent.  I think is a very succinct description of you and what that person knows of you.  He said that you have known each other since you were 13 years of age and been best mates.  He said that the two of you have spoken at length over the last six months and that you - he says, 'beyond disappointed', in yourself.  Letting your family and friends down in such an out of character manner.  He said:

'For as long as I've known Jeremy, he's never hurt a fly.  But unfortunately, bottled up anger, sadness, resentment towards a man who was meant to be his father, saw Jeremy act out in violence.  A trigger on the night in question was a friend talking about her abusive father and all the trauma of Jeremy's childhood, which he thought he had put behind him, came flooding back. 

Since then he has realised he hadn't dealt with anything, instead burying it deep within.  He sunk further into depression since the incident, with the realisation of what could be taken away from him with a conviction, coaching junior football, coaching his children's sporting teams and offshore perspective career opportunities'. 

28(I interpose, that is as a plumber obviously.)  Having to explain to his children what has happened, has happened.  He points out that you are seeing a counsellor on a weekly basis to help you with these difficulties.

29He goes onto say:

'Growing up with Jeremy was not I or any of our friends were used to seeing in a family unit.  Jeremy's mother and father separated when he was 13.  His father made him choose between himself and his mother and what his father had told Jeremy his mother had done, he made the difficult decision to live with his father.  Mum and two younger sisters stayed in the family home and Jeremy's father moved away to Maffra'.

30He then describes how you went to live with a grandmother, in circumstances where your father was clearly extremely alcoholic and violent.  I think I have outlined his character in pretty comprehensive form.  He says:

'I couldn't be prouder of the man and father Jeremy has become.  From having his own plumbing business, working offshore to a supervisor role with a major plumber company.  He's worked so hard to give his two kids the life he never had.  Owning a beautiful home in Maffra and a holiday apartment in Lakes Entrance and will never miss his kids basketball, football or netball games.  Jeremy is such a loved and valued member of the Maffra community, especially the football community.  He has played all his junior and senior football at Maffra, being captain for reserves for four years and player coach for three years.  He coaches both children's basketball teams.  In the last year he coached under 14s Maffra Football Team.  Was also asked to coach the league team.  Both teams having huge success and adoring Jeremy as a coach and a mentor'.

31He goes onto say:

'There's no excuse for violence, even Jeremy's upbringing, the mental scars that caused.  It most certainly played a huge part in such an out of character incident from the loving, loyal and honest person that I know.  We were proud of Jeremy for seeking professional help and also opening up to his family and friends and we are all here to support him'.

32I do not think the circumstances could have been put any better than that.  One of the risks in this situation is that if the matter was a conviction and the order of a community corrections order was imposed, with things like working with children, those types of requests would I think, give a totally unfair description of what this is about.  Obviously aggravated burglaries cannot take place and there must be an element of general deterrence in these circumstances, despite the enormous provocation that you operated under.

33It is my view that in all the circumstances here, a without conviction adjournment, with a significant contribution to a charity is one which recognises the inherent seriousness of aggravated burglary, that puts you into a category, where those who are checking whether you can work with children, and clearly you have a massive involvement with your children in your rural area, can see what the offence was for what it is worth.

34I will also, in these circumstances, make it clear, and your counsel will be able to explain this to you, that these sentencing remarks will be, after revision, published on and it may well be to your benefit to have these sentencing remarks when you are applying for positions with sporting clubs and the like, so that you can - people who are making those decisions can see what my view of it all was.

35All right, as I said, rehabilitation is well underway, risk of reoffending, zero.  The only thing I can do here is impose a non-conviction disposition.  It will be, if you agree, a without conviction.  Adjourned undertaking for a period of three years and the condition will be that one of good behaviour obviously, that you pay $2,000 to Beyond Blue within three months and that a receipt for that be provided to my associate in due course.  That is on all three charges, which I understand I can do.

36MR HAMMILL:  Yes, Your Honour.

37HIS HONOUR:  I do not have to separate the summary one?

38MR HAMMILL:  No.

39HIS HONOUR:  All right, so if you could sign this.  All right just stand up just for a second for me, Mr Jones.  You have entered an undertaking, if you breach it, you get called back and get resentenced, all right?  I am sure you are not going to, but any sort of offending like this, then we might not have too much choice next time.  I think I have made it very clear, I totally understand how all this has come about and totally understand the actions that you took that night, whilst intoxicated.  And also, regard as very laudable that you made endeavours afterwards to try and ensure this does not repeat itself, all right?

40So good luck with it and hopefully I will never see you again.  Thank you for that. 

41OFFENDER:  Thank you so much.

42HIS HONOUR:  Thank you Mr Hammill, thank you Mr Dogger.

43MR DOGGER:  Thank you, Your Honour.

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