Director of Public Prosecutions v Meizys

[2020] VCC 1863

IN THE COUNTY COURT OF VICTORIA

Revised

Not Restricted

Suitable for Publication

AT MELBOURNE

CRIMINAL JURISDICTION

CR 19-02380

CR 19-02386

CR 19-02387

DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS

v

PATRICK MEIZYS

TEAGAN BROADWAY-MARKS

NIKKITA THOMAS

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JUDGE:	HIS HONOUR JUDGE MULLALY
WHERE HELD:	Melbourne
DATE OF HEARING:	4 November 2020
DATE OF SENTENCE:	23 November 2020
CASE MAY BE CITED AS:	DPP v Meizys & Ors
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION:	[2020] VCC 1863

REASONS FOR SENTENCE

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APPEARANCES:	Counsel	Solicitors
For the Director of Public Prosecutions	Mr N. Batten	Office of Public Prosecutions
For Accused Meizys	Mr J. Desmond	Emma Turnbull Lawyers
For Accused Broadway-Marks	Mr J. Mortley	Buscombe & Madden Lawyers
For Accused Thomas	Mr B. Johnston	Law & Advocacy Centre for Women

HIS HONOUR: 

1Nikkita Thomas, Teagan Broadway-Marks and Patrick Meizys, you have all pleaded guilty after a sentence indication hearing.  The offences that you have pleaded guilty to are aggravated burglary and recklessly causing injury.  Ms Nikkita Thomas, you have also pleaded guilty to committing an indictable offence, being the aggravated burglary, while on bail.  The offences were committed on 23 September 2018, now well over two years ago. 

2I need to set out important matters in the lead-up to the offending.  As I said in the sentence indication ruling, the context enables a better or proper assessment of the gravity of your offending and your moral culpability. 

3You, Nikkita Thomas, resided with the victim in a house in Ballarat East during 2018.  When you moved out a dispute erupted regarding your property and your dog.  The day before the offending various attempts were made to sort out the collection of property and the discovery of the whereabouts of the dog and how it was faring.  What occurred was that the dispute escalated up to the point of the victim putting your property in the driveway of the house and setting that property on fire.  The fire brigade had to be called to put the fire out. 

4During this period the victim communicated some threats directed towards the dog.  All your efforts to go to the house and sort things out were rebuffed.  This very provocative set of circumstances caused you to lose patience and perspective.  You communicated with your co-accused and arranged with them to go to the house.  The time you went and what you did at the outset are telling as to what developed into a joint criminal intent.

5You and Ms Broadway-Marks and Mr Meizys arrived at the house around 5  am on 23 September.  You banged on the door; having got no response you simply entered.  The actions of the victim make it clear that your presence was unwanted.  She was in fact at home, as were others.  Having heard the noise which your group made coming in, the victim came out of her bedroom to confront you, unfortunately grabbing a sharp kitchen knife on the way.  What followed was unfortunate violence that thankfully did not have more dire consequences.

6The victim used the knife to stab you, Ms Thomas, in the back.  You, Ms Broadway-Marks, were also stabbed and you left.  You, Mr Meizys, grabbed a hammer and hit the victim on the arm, causing a broken arm but also causing the knife to be dropped.  In effect your actions were technically excessive in defence of others.

7After negotiations and the sentence indication hearing you all have pleaded guilty to aggravated burglary and recklessly causing injury on arraignment today.  The aggravated burglary was confrontational.  It was in the early hours and it involved you all acting in concert as a group.  And to the recklessly causing injury, a broken arm is no minor injury.  However, as I said at the sentence indication hearing, taking into account all aspects of these events within the house and the wider context, this in my view is not the most serious example of aggravated burglary. The acts of you, Mr Meizys, in recklessly causing injury, have aspects of defending the females, who were both stabbed, but excessively.

8Following the events of 23 September 2018 each of you were at different times arrested and remanded in custody.  In your case, Ms Thomas, your remand was for a period of 211 days that can be attributed to this offending.  Your bail conditions have been strict since your release and you have been on a community corrections order which has been going well from the reports that I received.

9You, Ms Broadway-Marks, did 279 days in custody before being released on bail to a strict in-house drug rehabilitation facility.  The time at that facility is relevant to the length of your overall sentence as well as to your improved prospects of rehabilitation.  I was told today that that period of time was eight weeks, or two months.

10You, Mr Meizys, remain in custody, but presently there are two remand warrants keeping you in prison.  The total number of days in custody for you is 614 days, or over 20 months, which are available to be declared as part of any sentence on these matters.  This is a significant length of time for these offences.  I will deal with your personal circumstances, Mr Meizys, shortly after dealing with others in announcing sentences, or I will delay announcing the sentences on each of you until the end.

11As to your personal circumstances, Ms Thomas, you are now 28 years old.  Your upbringing was deprived.  When you were with your mother and the partners that she had at the time, you witnessed violence perpetrated upon her.  You were in state care for many years of your adolescence.  That is from about the age of 13.  You yourself became a parent far too young at the age of 16.  You had three children, by my calculations, by the age of 21.  You and the partner you were involved with at the time, he was involved in serious crimes and you also were troubled by drug use.  Your three children were removed by the Department of Health and Human Services and placed into the care of your own mother.  I will speak more of this and the developments of late in regard to these three children.

12As it turned out, just prior to your remand, you became pregnant again and gave birth to your fourth child in custody.  The birth was not straightforward, and you were separated from the child for some time while he, your infant child, remained in hospital.  Since being granted bail you and your new partner have had the care of your now one-year-old child. 

13Your partner is a working man and provides a stable home life.  You and he have moved from your previous associates in the Ballarat area to another regional town.  You have there established a strong bond with drug counsellors and are doing well with respect to your drug addictions.  You were placed on a community corrections order by a magistrate and the report I have seen is positive as to your compliance, your attitude, and your prospects for the future.

14Your care of your child is such that there are no longer any protective concerns from the Department of Health and Human Services.  This has led to a slow reconnection with your other three children.  Despite your circumstances and drug habit at an early age, you do not have many prior criminal matters, which is another positive in your favour.  Since your release on bail you have not committed any further offences.

15Thus, your solid reform since your release is indicative that with further supervision in the community you are likely to be wholly reclaimed.  That is in everyone's interest.  As with all accused, I take into account what I see as a weighty matter of your plea of guilty in this for these offences.  It is a weighty matter, especially given the circumstances of the suspension of jury trials.  There has been a delay both before and since the outbreak of the pandemic.  There would have been a much greater delay had this matter not resolved as it did.

16Your circumstances of being in custody while you were pregnant and in custody when giving birth were particularly onerous.  Also, you did receive a stab injury, which is extracurial punishment. 

17Your crimes must be denounced, and others must be deterred.  You were at the heart of why your group went to the victim's house in the early hours; however, taking into account my assessment of the gravity of the offending and your moral culpability, I am well satisfied that your time in custody is sufficient punishment and acts as a deterrent together with a further period on a community corrections order.

18You have been assessed favourably for a community corrections order.  You need some further supervision and further mandated rehabilitation programs.  These do operate too as an ongoing punishment.  You need to understand if you breach the community corrections order then you come back before me and the same approach will not be followed.  There will be a much harsher outcome for you.

19In my view the community corrections order need not in the circumstances be of great length, given the progress that you have made on your current community corrections order.  Nonetheless it must be time for you to consolidate.  I will come back to the length of the community corrections order and overall sentence shortly.

20Teagan Broadway-Marks, before moving to your personal circumstances I need to say something of your role int his offending.  It seems you went along to the victim's house to support your friend Ms Thomas.  Your role as quite limited.  You were there and complicit in the offences, but yours was the minor role.  That said, for your troubles you were stabbed by the victim.

21You spent over nine months in custody.  This has the benefit of interrupting your fierce ice habit.  You were bailed to the intensive in-patient drug rehabilitation program at the Bridge in the Bendigo area, I think.  You successfully completed that program and moved on to out-patient treatment and counselling in the Ballarat area.  As a consequence of your progress, you are no longer in need of that intensive treatment.  You have learnt from your experiences and have now enrolled in a course to seek a qualification yourself as a drug counsellor.  That is all very much to your credit.

22You are now 25, the youngest of the three offenders.  You left school in Year 9 and worked in retail.  You gained some qualifications as a hairdresser but have not followed that profession.  You took to using ice at age 18 and it came to dominate your life.  Notwithstanding this, you have limited prior convictions.

23Your prospects of staying out of trouble and in fact making a positive contribution to the community look good to me.  Given your lesser role and the fact that you served 279 days in custody and then two months in the Bridge program, in my view you have, in terms of incarceration, been appropriately punished.  The question is whether a further period on a community corrections order is warranted.  In my view there is a need, despite the submission made by your counsel, for limited further supervision.

24I have already mentioned your plea of guilty or the pleas of guilty.  It is of significant weight.  I have balanced the need for parity with your role and the time that you have spent in custody in coming to the sentence that I have.  I will announce shortly.

25Patrick Meizys, you were called into this dispute late in the piece.  It seems to me you were brought along to add muscle to intimidate the victim.  Having got into the house, you did not initiate any violent attack but rather responded to the violence of the victim.  That is when you saw the victim was armed with a knife and was using it to stab your co-accused.  It was then that you hit her arm with the hammer.  It was a forceful blow which broke her arm.

26Your role was important, and your criminality is significant, but in all the circumstances a balanced view must be taken as to why you hit the victim.  In the end you have pleaded guilty to that offence of recklessly causing injury and the aggravated burglary and I see this plea as a very significant matter, given all the circumstances.  It mitigates and you and others must be able to appreciate just how weighty a plea of guilty like this is, especially in these days of suspended jury trials.

27I have indicated to you you will not receive any more gaol for these offences.  Given this offending and your prior history, a gaol term is plainly the only appropriate sentence; however, I take into account the most recent psychological report which outlines that after your lengthy time on remand you were much more motivated to stay out of trouble into the future.  There is set out in this report, that is the report of Mr McKinnon, a realistic assessment of your current progress and your prospects.

28You come to this now, it seems, with a better outlook, but you come to it from being a long way back.  By that I mean that your upbringing was very damaging.  The death of your mother and grandmother left a very significant impact upon you.  All around you, that is your male relatives, were immersed in crime and drug taking.  After you lost the stability of your grandmother you took to heavy drug use and crime.  As a consequence, you have served terms of imprisonment of significant length and have a very concerning criminal history.

29The psychologist Mr McKinnnon wrote of your prospects and I will refer to that shortly.  A matter of importance is you have remained close, despite your incarceration, to a law-abiding couple who are willing to provide you with practical support upon your ultimate release.  By that I mean you are held on remand for both this offending and another standover-type offence with very serious aspects in that episode which remains as a trial to be held when trials resume in Ballarat.  That set of offences is, as I said, heading towards a jury trial whenever that may be.

30The report of the psychologist Mr McKinnon that I have referred to contains the following important matters that I received during the sentence indication.  In these reasons they are important.  He wrote that you stated that you had spent most of the time that you were on remand at the MRC where you engaged in whatever rehabilitative programs were available to you.  You used the prison fitness centre every day and you have come up to the point of being a unit billet.  You engage in week sessions with Caraniche counsellor.

31Mr McKinnon quoted you saying these words:

'I put a lot of effort to fix myself as much as I can.  I make sure I don't come back to gaol next time around.  I feel done with gaol.  I reconnected with my twin sister, cousins, uncles and a few friends.  I'm really trying to move forward.  I'm trying to get back to being a decent person.  I've become more switched on about things now.  Counselling has really helped.  I know I have to work on myself a lot more, it's easy to slip back into hold behaviours.  I can't blame other people for anything, it's up to me to be fully equipped when I get out and not come back.  Whatever I get I'll cop and keep working on myself'.

32You also referred to the couple that you had established a close relationship with, and Mr McKinnon wrote that you said you would be living with the couple: 

'I talk to them every week on the phone.  He [the male] has work for me, truck driving, labouring, whatever is required'. 

33Mr McKinnon concluded:

'In my opinion, while spending more than two years on remand Mr Meizys has undergone a period of personal growth and improved his insight into his difficulties.  With ongoing close, professional support Mr Meizys has significantly improved prospects for continuing his rehabilitation and the likelihood of him reoffending in a serious manner has been reduced.  However, Mr Meizys is himself only too aware that he remains funereal to relapse and to substance abuse and offending and he will require close supervision and support over a sustained period in order to have any reasonable prospects of rehabilitation for maintaining progress'. 

34In short, you have developed significant insight into why it is that you continually commit offences and then end up in gaol.

35Mr Meizys, I considered imposing a corrections order upon you as well as the period of imprisonment.  I understood at the time that you could not necessarily have taken up the community corrections order until released on all matters, but all this became academic when an assessment for your suitability for a community corrections order did not take place.

36I have revisited the variety of issues involved in the fixing of sentence for the matters that are before me while you remain on remand for other matters.  I have reconsidered whether a community corrections order, given the gravity of the offending as I see it and the need for protection of the community and deterrence to you and deterrence to others as well as denunciation.  I have, as with others, taken into account as I have stressed, the very significant weigh to be given to your plea of guilty.

37You have now served 614 days, or over 20 months, which can be attributed to this matter.  In all the circumstances this would be a solid sentence for these crimes committed by you with your history and your improved prospects.  That is a sentence of that length would be a solid sentence using the individualised sentencing as required by the High Court. 

38In the end I have determined that no further punishment by way of a community corrections order is necessary.  It would, as I have said, give rise to practical problems, but the appropriate punishment is a sentence which is slightly less than the time available, that is the time served.  But as I have indicated, you are on remand for other matters and the time that you spend on remand may be attributable to other matters ultimately or be dead time. 

39Returning to the sentences that I impose, just dealing with you, Mr Meizys, having just delivered the reasons that are attributable to you, I intend to impose an aggregate term.  The term I impose for the aggravated burglary and the recklessly causing injury is 18 months.  I declare that you have served 18 months in custody on remand that are attributable to this offending.  In fact you have spent more than that, but I attribute from the amount of time you have spent in custody 18 months, which is a period of time that I will ensure - that is the 18 months is entered into the records of the court.

40The reason I will enter into the records of the court, having made the declaration that is available is that the prison authorities will then be left in no doubt that you have served each and every day of the sentence that I have imposed.  That is your remand in prison will be what keeps you there.  I also make it clear so that any other judge who is dealing with other matters for which you come before the courts can understand that the sentence that I imposed was 18 months and 18 months were declared as time already served.

41Had you pleaded not guilty to these offences and been found guilty of them, I would have imposed a sentence of four years with a minimum term of two years and six months.

42Nikkita Thomas, I intend to impose an aggregate sentence to you for all the matters, including the summary matters, that is the aggravated burglary, the recklessly causing injury and committing the indictable offence on bail.  You are sentenced to term of imprisonment of 211 days.  You have served 211 days on remand.  This figure having been reckoned, I now declare that it is part of the sentence that I have just imposed.  In fact, it is every single day of the sentence of imprisonment that I have just imposed.

43A declaration will be entered into the records of the court so the prison authorities or all authorities know that you have done every day of the gaol term that I have just imposed.  Together with the term of imprisonment I impose with conviction a 12-month community corrections order.  The conditions of that will be supervision, that you have to continue or undergo treatment and assessment in terms of your drug problems, and you must undergo treatment and assessment for your mental health problems.  There is no need for any other programs such as particular programs dealing with reoffending.

44Had you pleaded not guilty to these offences and been found guilty of them I would have imposed a period of two years and nine months with a minimum term of one year and nine months.

45Teagan Broadway-Marks, the aggregate sentence for you for the aggravated burglary and the recklessly causing injury is in fact 279 days' imprisonment.  I declare that you have served 279 days' imprisonment on remand.  I ensure this declaration is entered into the records of the court so the authorities know that you have done every day of the sentence of imprisonment that I have imposed.

46Together with that term of imprisonment I impose a four-month community corrections order with the one condition:  that you be under supervision.  I do not intend to require you to do unpaid community work or any further drug assessment and treatment.  You must continue with that as you have, sensibly and voluntarily, as long as it is needed, which may be a very significant period of time.

47Had you pleaded not guilty to these offences and been found guilty of them I would have imposed a sentence of two years and six months with a non-parole period of one year and six months.

48Anything further required?

49COUNSEL:  No, Your Honour.

50MR BATTEN:  I believe there are disposal orders that are being sought, Your Honour.

51HIS HONOUR:  I will sign orders disposing of what is sought by the Crown in respect of these offences.

52MR BATTEN:  If Your Honour pleases.

53HIS HONOUR:  Thank you.  If there's nothing further, I thank counsel for their very considerable assistance in bringing this matter to an end.  I thank Mr Batten for his approach to this complicated matter with much more serious charges that has brought about a resolution.  And I need to talk to my staff, meaning everyone else will head away.  You don't need to speak to Mr Meizys, do you, Mr Desmond?  Your instructor will speak to him on telephone?

54MR DESMOND:  Yes, he can give my instructor a ring, Your Honour.

55HIS HONOUR:  All right

56MR DESMOND:  Thank you.

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