Director of Public Prosecutions v Puglisi

[2019] VCC 632

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

AT LATROBE VALLEY
CRIMINAL JURISDICTION

CR 17-01069
CR-18-02614

DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS

v

ETHAN PUGLISI

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JUDGE:	HIS HONOUR JUDGE SMALLWOOD
WHERE HELD:	Latrobe Valley
DATE OF HEARING:	9 May 2019
DATE OF SENTENCE:	9 May 2019
CASE MAY BE CITED AS:	DPP v Puglisi
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION:	[2019] VCC 632

REASONS FOR SENTENCE
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APPEARANCES:	Counsel	Solicitors
For the Director of Public Prosecutions	Mr S. Devlin	Office of Public Prosecutions
For the Accused	Mr N. Tehan	Slade & Parsons

HIS HONOUR: 

1Ethan Puglisi, you have pleaded guilty to one charge of armed robbery.  That crime carries a maximum penalty of 25 years' imprisonment.  You pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity and with some reservations I accept that your plea is accompanied by remorse.  Obviously you get the utilitarian benefit of that plea of guilty.

2In your situation the most concerning thing is that you are still only 20 years of age.  You have prior convictions of genuine significance from the Children's Court as well as adult and indeed on 27 November 2017 I sentenced you to be imprisoned for a period of nine months for an aggravated burglary and associated charges.  At that stage I was hopeful that you would be able to go onto a community corrections order and complete it and you had already done 267 days, which I did not declare so as to be able to get that CCO into effect.  You were released on 20 August 2018 and this offending happened within about six or seven weeks.

3It is clear that after your release I had anticipated that you would be able to live with and work for a Mr Hosking; that situation fell through and within a very short time you were effectively homeless and living on the streets.  It is in that scenario that the following occurred.

4A Mr Santiago Jaramillo was a Colombian who was working at the Mon Bijou restaurant/bar in the city and around about 1 o'clock in the morning on 28 September.  He was in a laneway that leads to the restaurant off Flinders Lane.  He was approached by you.  There were two others with you.  They were never charged and accordingly I regard this as you being on your own.  You asked Mr Jaramillo for cigarettes and change and he told you he had none.  You then produced a knife from the right side of your jacket and said, 'If you don't drop the backpack I'll stab your face'.  He described the knife as a silver-coloured foldable blade about 10 centimetres long.  He took off his backpack and threw it to one side.  You got that backpack and that gives rise to the charge of armed robbery. 

5He described you and you were ultimately arrested later on during the day.  What had occurred was that Mr Jaramillo had followed the three of you and at one point in time you had thrown the backpack down.  As I understand it he was able to get his belongings back.  You essentially made no comment in regard to these matters when arrested by police in the early hours of the morning in the city and have been in custody ever since.

6As your counsel pointed out to me in the plea this morning, you have been in adult custody for virtually two-thirds of a very short adult life.  It is armed robbery.  I am always reluctant to categorise the seriousness of armed robbery, but this is certainly not at the higher end of armed robbery.  But it occurred within days of release from prison.  You have prior convictions for the same sort of offending in terms of violence and accordingly it has to be regarded as serious. 

7It calls for the application of general and specific deterrence, denunciation and appropriate punishment.  A custodial sentence with a parole period is the only available option.  A community corrections order was clearly a waste of time last time.  You were using within days of your release and, as indicated to your counsel, the Crown have effectively agreed the only thing I can do here is to try and give you an opportunity for parole earlier than would otherwise have been the case.  I am very mindful of your age of 20.  In a perfect world one would have hoped that all this had been done in a youth justice scenario, but that is clearly not possible and clearly was not possible last time. 

8I then look to matters personal to you and effectively when I sentenced you back in November 2017 the circumstances were summarised.  I can just simply do it again I suppose.  I have had before me reports, I have read the Children's Court report I had back from 2012.  There were references tendered on the last occasion. 

9Put into simple terms, you are now 20 years of age.  You were exposed to chronic physical and emotional abuse as a young child.  You were a victim of violence from a young age.  You were exposed to significant drug abuse and neglect in your formative years.  You were sexually abused.  You were placed into care when you were seven years of age within residential care and, as I indicated when I sentenced you back in 2017, no person I have ever met has been helped by that.

10Since then, apart from being placed with a foster family between April 2009 and 2011 and two short periods of youth justice detention, you spent the remainder of your childhood in DHS residential care.  Accordingly, apart from the five-week period that you were at liberty before committing this offence, you have spent now years in adult custody.  You were smoking cannabis by 10, methylamphetamine by 15, and I am not going to go into all the various forms of abuse that you suffered.  They are self-evident from the reports.

11You are virtually illiterate, you have no educational history at all.  Clearly you suffer from paranoid thinking which gives rise to certainly the previous offending and I do not know what role that may played in this.  You spent significant periods of your most recent incarceration, which so far is 223 days, in the management unit and it is clear that in a gaol situation you are prepared to take on other prisoners and even at the age of 20 all the alarm bells are there for institutionalisation. 

12How much of all this you comprehend and how much insight you have into where your life is going is highly problematic.  The prospects of your rehabilitation are really up to you and I am very guarded in that respect.  The risk of you reoffending if you do not rehabilitate is going to be high. 

13Tendered on your behalf here is a letter from your sister and a very courageous, if I may say so, letter from your mother in terms of the background that you have endured.  I am well aware of the principles in cases such as Tomgneun and Bugmy, all those matters.  You have got clearly a cognitive and intellectual deficit.  Verdins to a certain extent comes into play, but of course, as I indicated to your counsel, community protection has to come into play as well.  This is somewhat of a balancing act.

14It is a depressing thing indeed to have to sentence somebody as young as you in your situation, but there is no other way around it.  Accordingly on the charge of armed robbery you are sentenced to be imprisoned for a period of two years and four months.  Because of your age I direct that you serve a minimum term of 14 months before becoming eligible for parole, which is an earlier opportunity than I would otherwise have given bearing in mind your history.

15I direct that 223 days be reckoned as having been served under this sentence and I say that but for your plea of guilty you would have been sentenced to a period of three years' imprisonment with a minimum term of two. 

16No other orders I have to make?

17MR DEVLIN:  No, as Your Honour pleases.

18MR TEHAN:  No, Your Honour.  Thanks, Your Honour.

19HIS HONOUR:  Yes, thanks, Mr  Tehan.  I appreciate it.

20MR TEHAN:  Thank you, Your Honour.

21HIS HONOUR:  Thanks, Mr Devlin. 

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