Director of Public Prosecutions v Muratovski

IN THE COUNTY COURT OF VICTORIA

AT LATROBE VALLEY

CRIMINAL DIVISION

Revised

Not Restricted

Suitable for Publication

CR 22-01153

DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS

SAFET MURATOVSKI

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JUDGE:	His Honour Judge Smallwood
WHERE HELD:	Latrobe Valley
DATE OF HEARING:	31 August 2022
DATE OF SENTENCE:	31 August 2022
CASE MAY BE CITED AS:	DPP v Muratovski
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION:	[2022] VCC 2373

REASONS FOR SENTENCE
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APPEARANCES:

Counsel

Solicitors

For the Director of Public

Prosecutions

Mr D. O'Doherty

Office of Public

Prosecutions

For the Accused

Ms K. McFarlane

McFarlane Criminal

Lawyers

HIS HONOUR:

Safet Muratovski, you have pleaded guilty on an indictment to three charges of theft, one charge of damaging property and one charge of prohibited person possess a firearm. Those crimes carry maximum penalties of 10 years,

10 years and 10 years respectively.
You have also pleaded guilty to a number of uplifted summary matters. So far as those matters are concerned, on Charge 7, I will convict and discharge.
On Charges 2, 8 and 10, I will give you 30 days concurrent, an aggregate.
On Charge 10, any licence to drive a motor vehicle is hereby cancelled and you are disqualified from obtaining a licence for a period of 12 months. So that takes that matter out of the equation.
You had pleaded guilty on what would appear to be a settled indictment and you must get the benefit of that.
You are 46 years of age, remorse bearing in mind your criminal history and your mental statement is highly problematic, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt in respect of that.
You of course get the utilitarian benefit of that plea of guilty. It is also a plea which has been made in the time of Warboyes and a significant discount should be given.
I am also aware that you have now been in custody for 229 days and would have done a significant part of that sentence under COVID conditions, and as best I can, I take that into account as well.
You have pages of prior convictions. A lot for driving, mainly for street social offences, if I can put it that way. You have clearly had a very difficult upbringing and childhood and you have lived a transit existence and still do. You have had long periods of homelessness and the like, so whilst a very long criminal history is probably understandable in your situation, however, it does not assist you in a situation such as this. I will read out the summary in a moment, or summaries and I note that there are no victim impact statements.
A summary of the offending. This can be done in brief. The summaries have actually been now tendered.
On 7 August 2021, you drove into the Princes Highway Caltex Station at Longwarry, got petrol and drove off without paying for it.
In early October 2021, you were staying at the Latrobe River Campground, and you met the - who became the victim for the first time. You apparently bogged your vehicle in a ditch for some reason or another blamed him, began to abuse him. He went back to his campsite. You abused him again. He left. Packed up and left on his pushbike towing a small trailer containing his belongings, which is a pretty sad state of affairs bearing in mind what happened next.
On 26 October he rode his bike into Drouin West where he stopped. You saw him drive up, you drove past him, put your brakes on and said, 'I'm gonna run over you because you called the police on me.'
He was fearful, parked his bike and trailer on the nature strip, and knocked on the door of a house. Police were called. While he was at the house, you got out of your vehicle, dragged his bike and trailer towards your vehicle, removed all his property, which is his bike charger, his phone charger, tin jerry can, food and a mobile phone and just put them in your vehicle, that is theft, and you then got back into your vehicle and drove over his bike and trailer.
That is pretty ugly offending and I think you will understand that. It is probably all he had, that bloke. In any event, that is Charge 2 and 3.
Charge 4, you - there was a David Olsen who's 65 years of age, with mobility problems due to a back injury. He was on a rural property that backed onto Latrobe River at Nugee.
On 11 January 2022, he had a fall in his rear yard. He saw you, parked on the opposite side of the river and called out for help. And you come over and assisted him, the pair of you stayed together and consumed a number of beers together. His next memory is waking up in the early evening of 12 January 2022, lying beside his vehicle in the shed, and being attended to by a neighbour, he has no idea what happened to him.
In any event, the neighbour at the house had discovered that Mr Olsen's gun locker had been broken into and a firearm had been taken. In any event, the - I do not know how many guns were in it, but you were only charged with taking the one gun. That is an offence which I regard very, very seriously in the normal course of events. Most of the gun thefts around here and all throughout rural Victoria are targeted farms with people stealing for the purposes of selling them. Yours I accept in this situation was situational and was not a planned theft.
In any event, when your - apparently your vehicle caught fire, for reasons I do not understand, the gun was recovered so that at least it is not at large in the community putting other people at risk. In any event, on 13 January for some reason or other, you ran off the road, stopped in a paddock, your car caught on fire, you were found sleeping in a shed.
Police found you there, and they also fortunately found the shotgun as well, and I have already been through that. Ultimately, it ended up as a plea and here we are.
You have now been in custody for 229 days and my initial thoughts were that a CCO to follow that might be the appropriate disposition, but having looked through all the material, I think that I will be giving you a gaol sentence, which will enable your release fairly soon, and I do that because I know that NDIS are involved with you and I have far more faith in this situation of them keeping you on the straight and narrow than I would Corrections. And I do not mean that as a challenge to Corrections. NDIS and the work they do is known to me, as in a letter from Naomi Aladise and its correspondence with a Mr Conlan and they are working on when you are exited from gaol, they'll be able to get you accommodation and a safe NDIS application and exit plan.
You apparently do still have Muslim connections and they will be looking into that as well and you will be supported, post release and placed as a - well you will be taken as a voluntary patient, and they will take it all from there. I am not going to try and give them directions to what they should do. It is all pretty apparent to them. I have a report from Dr Cunningham, which outlines your history and I do not think I need to go through that in any great detail.
You were born in Australia, your parents raised you with two younger brothers and a sister. You three children were placed into Baltara when you were aged nine, which is a facility very well known to me. Your father is a violent alcohol and you were sexually abused by workers at Baltara. You were all returned to your mother's care when you were aged 11 and your mother then died suddenly from a heart attack.
You were then placed in Allambie and then lived with several different foster families, and you ended up eventually living with a good family who you still regard as having good values. You were independent from the age of 16 and lived in a caravan. You had a relationship, you had three children from as I understand it. And I think there is from what I read before there appear to be intervention orders in relation to that but I will not go there.
You have abused alcohol since you were very young and that is highly understandable. You would disappear into the bush for weeks on end and when you - back when this report was made, you had not seen your kids for four or five years. You had moved to Lakes Entrance in 2010, you have stayed pretty straight for a couple of years, and several periods of homelessness and I have to accept that you have spent a lot of time as you were at this stage, living in the back of your car essentially, and you said to Mr Cunningham, drinking yourself to death. His assessment in the end is that you have post-traumatic stress disorder, and I think that is clearly the case and that will require treatment and ongoing treatment.
He says it is from the abuse and disconnection in your childhood environment, you were exposed to violence and alcoholism from your father and people these days understand just how bad Baltara and Allambie were at around about that period of time. So, you have that disorder which brings into play, well in my view, virtually all the aspects of Verdins, but because of that dreadful childhood, you clearly also have the benefit of the principles laid out in Bugmy and I do not think you are a suitable vehicle for general deterrence, specific deterrence seem to just play no part in your life, it is a fairly hopeless one, so we hope that NDIS can get you back on the straight and narrow.
You will clearly benefit from psychological and drug and alcohol rehabilitation, because there is nothing much I can do about that. The prospects of your rehabilitation would have to be pretty remote I suspect but it is possible, and if you can do that, the risk of you re-offending should be limited. Whilst it appears from looking at your history that you do not offend in extremely serious matters, like armed robberies, you have just got to understand what you did to that poor bloke in Drouin was just disgraceful. And you have just got to understand you just cannot treat other people like that. You appear to be a big man and a frightening looking man so, again, they are all matters that are going to have to be taken into account, in the future.
As I said Bugmy and Verdins might have parts so general and specific deterrence are significantly modified. Denunciation is problematic in your situation and punishment, gaol is going to be enough. So, taking all those matters into account of the four charges on the indictment - five charges on the indictment, your sentence of an aggregate period of 275 days' imprisonment,. And I direct that 229 days be reckoned as having been served under this sentence.
It is a difficult situation, the 6AAA because it is effectively meaningless isn't it, in a circumstance like this. They all would have run as separate trials, but for the purpose of the record, I will simply say, that had - but for your plea of guilty, I would have sentenced you to be imprisoned for one year.

[2022] VCC 2373

31 August 2022