Director of Public Prosecutions v Rutherford
[2014] VCC 2220
•18 December 2014
| IN THE COUNTY COURT OF VICTORIA | Revised Not Restricted Suitable for Publication |
AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Case No.
| DPP |
| V |
| JAMES RUTHERFORD |
---
JUDGE: | Her Honour Judge Hampel | |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne | |
DATE OF HEARING: | 27 and 28 October 2014, 17 December 2014 | |
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 18 December 2014 | |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | DPP v Rutherford | |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2014] VCC 2220 | |
REASONS FOR SENTENCE
---
Catchwords:
---
APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the Crown | Mr J. Shaw | OPP |
| For the Accused | Mr J. McQuillan | Doogue, O’Brien George |
HER HONOUR:
1 James Rutherford, you have pleaded guilty to one charge of sexual penetration of a child under 16, that is Charge 1; and one charge of obtain property by deception, Charge 2. Charge 1 is a representative charge, covering a period of offending spanning just over two months, from late January to late March 2008. Charge 2 spans a period of offending of just over 12 months, over a year later, from July 2009 to July 2010.
2 The victim of the offending in respect of both charges is Elise Jones. [1] When the two of you met in August 2007, Elise was 15 years and five months old. She lived at home with her parents and was in Year 10, and worked part-time at a hotel in outer suburban Melbourne.
[1] Pseudonym used.
3 You were 25. You had left school and home when you were 15, had fathered a child at 18, and, on your own account, have been her primary carer for at least a year, before leaving your home in Alaska at age 20 to marry and settle in Australia. You had, on your own account, been in employment since the age of 15, labouring or later working in security and crowd control. You were employed at the hotel where Elise had her part-time job as a security person or crowd controller.
4 On the agreed statement of facts, shortly after meeting, you asked Elise how old she was and she told you she was 15. You initiated contact with her out of work, adding her to your Myspace account, sending her your phone number, and eventually she gave you her number. Contact between the two of you became frequent. You were apparently in the throes of an unhappy break-up of your marriage and you had moved into the home of two work colleagues. About four months after meeting Elise, in December 2007, you kissed her for the first time.
5 On 23 January 2008, you had penile/vaginal sexual intercourse with Elise for the first time. You knew she was under 16. Over the next two months, up to the occasion of her 16th birthday, you had sexual intercourse with her on many occasions. The charge of sexual penetration of a child under 16, for which you fall to be sentenced, is a representative charge, covering that two month course of conduct. The act identified, for the purposes of the charge, is the first occasion, to which I have just referred. Over the two month period, the sexual activity occurred in various places, predominantly parks, a vacant block of land, or the friends' place where you were living.
6 You told your friends, the couple with whom you were living, that you were having a sexual relationship with Elise, and were aware it was wrong because she was under 16. They also knew she was under 16 and told you it was wrong. Undeterred, you continued to engage in sexual activity with Elise, up to the time of her 16th birthday. And after that, when it was no longer unlawful, you remained in a relationship, including a sexual relationship with her for two years.
7 Both before you began to engage in sexual acts with Elise and after they had started, throughout the course of your relationship, it would appear, you began to tell her elaborate stories. In my view, on the material before me, it was clearly to garner her sympathy for you, as well as establish a relationship with her.
8 You told her that you had spent time in juvenile detention in Alaska. You told her that you went to Iraq, serving in a secret force. You told her you had a daughter and the daughter was being adopted by her step-father in America. You told her you needed money to prevent that from happening. You told her that your wife had refused to give you money, so that you had to walk home to Bulleen from the city when you finished work at 4 am, unless Elise gave you money. You told her that you would repay her. You told her that you were suing for an amount of $60,000 that you were owed by your former employer. Most, if not all of these thing that you told Elise was false. As a result of these stories, Elise gave you $15,000 from her earnings, over the period of three or so years that you were involved with her.
9 Charge 2, the charge of obtain property by deception, relates to a sum of $2,000, given to you by Elise over that 12 month period from July 2009 to July 2010, and this was paid by her to you as a result of one of the many lies that you told her. It was a particularly pernicious lie. You told Elise that you had been diagnosed with cancer and that you had to have chemotherapy. You told her you were being treated at Peter MacCallum Hospital. You said you were in a lot of pain and you could not afford some of the tablets necessary for your treatment. Over the 12 month period covered by this charge, Elise gave you approximately $200 per month from her earnings at the hotel, so that you could buy the tablets. As she said in her statement, even during her Year 12 exams, she continued to work at the hotel in order to be able to provide you with the money to pay for what she thought was cancer treating medication that you could not otherwise afford.
10 The sexual relationship with Elise came to an end when she was 18, and sometime after that, you confessed to her that you had never suffered from cancer. Elise came to realise that the reasons that you had given her for wanting her to advance you money were lies, or many of them were. She asked you to repay the monies that she had advanced you, and you ultimately paid $4,500 to her. Mr McQuillan, your counsel, said that that sum was arrived at, because that was all the money that you could afford at the time that Elise made the request for repayment.
11 These matters did not come to light until late 2010, when Elise made a complaint to the police. It took over 12 months after that before you were questioned and later charged. You were ultimately charged with multiple charges of sexual penetration of a child under 16 and charges of obtaining by deception. You denied the charges. A committal hearing was held and Elise was cross-examined at length. It was put to her that she had lied to you about her age, telling you she was 18, not 15. It was put to her that there was no sexual activity until she was 16. She maintained the position that you have now, by your guilty plea, acknowledged to be the truth, namely that she told you from the outset she was 15, and that you knew that she was not yet 16 when the sexual activity, which occurred between January and March 2008, took place.
12 Matters took a complicated course after you were committed for trial. At some stage, a single charge of maintain a sexual relationship with a child under 16 was substituted for 18 discrete charges of sexual penetration of a child under 16. You entered a plea of guilty to that charge. The judge hearing the plea expressed misgivings about whether it was an appropriate charge, given the combination of circumstances, in particular, that you and Elise had maintained a consensual relationship for two years after her 16th birthday, that is the for two years following immediately upon the unlawful sexual activity that was the subject of that maintain sexual relationship charge. He also expressed misgivings about the competence of your then legal adviser.
13 As a result, the plea hearing was adjourned and you applied to change your plea. You swore an affidavit. In it you swore that you did not know that Elise was under 16 when you had sexual activity, and that you had pleaded guilty because your then lawyer had advised you it would be difficult to prove your defence and the best way to go ahead was to plead guilty. In your affidavit you swore that you felt wrong doing that, because you did not believe you were guilty, that you did not believe that you had done anything wrong. You swore that you had not seen the defence response filed in response to summary of prosecution opening before it had been filed with the court, buy having since seen it, that it was consistent with your not guilty plea.
14 Your defence response contained the following assertions: That the complainant lied to you, telling you she was 18 when you first met. That she actively pursued you. That you first commenced a sexual relationship with her when she was 16. You expressly denied having a sexual relationship with her when she was 15, having borrowed $15,000 from her, having told her that you had cancer, and having dishonestly obtained a financial advantage by deception.
15 A psychological report, dated 26 April 2013 was prepared by the psychologist Semra Durmaz, for the initial plea hearing. According to Ms Durmaz's report, you told her that Elise had told you that she was in Year 12, that she had had previous boyfriends and previous sexual encounters, and that you believed that she was old enough. You told Ms Durmaz that you had had sex with Elise between January and March 2009, that is in the two months leading up to her 17th birthday. You said that it was not until later that Elise had told you that she was only 16, and you told her that when you found out Elise's real age, you began to feel sick. You experienced severe anxiety symptoms and were prescribed Xanax.
16 You said you decided to stop seeing Elise because you did not want to hold her back from pursing her ambition of going to university, and also because she was underage and it was not right. You told Ms Durmaz, according to her report, that you started to find excuses so that you would not see her, but that you remained a friend to her. You told her that you regretted the relationship with Elise and that you did not think to ask her to show you her ID card so you could have found out her real age. You said to her that it was a major failure of judgment on your part to get involved with a girl and not seek clarification of her age, and you attributed this to immaturity on your part.
17 You repeatedly expressed regret to Ms Durmaz that you became involved with Elise without checking her age, and said you were naïve and trusting when you accepted her when she said she was 18.
18 Leave to change your plea was granted and the matter relisted for trial. Your new counsel expressly adopted the defence response which had previously been filed and from which I have quoted. Despite misgivings expressed by the original plea judge about the appropriateness of a charge of maintaining a sexual relationship with a child under 16, the prosecution had indicated that it intended to proceed with that charge and not to reinstate the 18 separate charges of sexual penetration of a child under 16, which had originally been laid.
19 Ultimately, after the trial was due to take place, on the listed date, the matter resolved into a plea again. The Crown accepted a plea of guilty to a single representative count of sexual penetration of a child under 16, covering those multiple admitted penetrations during the two month period immediately before Elise's 16th birthday, and to a single charge of obtaining financial advantage by deception, confined to the $2,000 obtained by reason of the lies you told about having cancer and being unable to afford the necessary medication.
20 You accepted as truthful the prosecution summary relied on for the purposes of the plea. But for a characterisation of your early conduct towards Elise as grooming, which had been contained in the original trial and plea summary, the plea summary presented on this plea hearing was on all fours with the original summaries presented for the first plea and the trial.
21 The effect of all of this meant that two years went by between the time you were committed for trial and the listing of the trial and its ultimate resolution into a plea before me.
22 Elise has filed two victim impact statements. She requested that they not be real aloud in court, but I have read each of them. She expresses what one can understand to be the regret of an immature young person, legally not old enough or responsible enough to make decisions about embarking upon a sexual relationship, and that she did so and has expressed eloquently the longer term impact that has had on her, regret for her own actions, but also regret for the way she was manipulated by a man so much older and more experienced than her.
23 Your pleas of guilty to these two charges clearly have utilitarian value. They have saved the cost and the time of a trial. They also have value, because they vindicate the truthfulness of Elise, in the account that she gave and what you have now accepted and adopted by your express adoption of the prosecution summary, as well as by your pleas of guilty.
24
On the plea I was provided with a psychological report, prepared for the purposes of this plea, by Ms Carla Lechner, and based on an interview she had with you only days ago. She sets out in it the family history, as recounted to her by you. Given the acknowledgment by your plea and by your acceptance of the agreed summary of facts of your conduct in telling lies and spinning tall tales to Elise about your background and circumstances, and in the absence of objective evidence to support the account that you gave
Ms Lechner, it is difficult to know whether all or any of it is truthful. You told her that you were born in Alaska, that you never knew your biological father, that you had a difficult relationship with your mother, who often told you that you had not been wanted, and a difficult relationship with the man who, until you were the age of nine, you believed was your biological father, but who you then discovered was your step-father.
25 You said that your childhood was blighted also by the fact that your mother was an alcoholic; that you were subjected to physical and emotional and possibly sexual abuse; that you were bullied at school; that you were wrongly diagnosed with ADHD and medicated for some time for that; that you had been selected for enrolment in a school program for gifted children, but had been prevented, either by poverty or bad behaviour, from attending that; that you had been placed into Alaskan child services for eight months, in an attempt to control your anger; that you had left school and home at the age of 15; that you had fathered a child at the age of 18, for whom you had provided primary care for two years, due to the child's mother substance abuse problems in the very early years of that child's life; that you had left for Australia at the age of 20 to marry an Australian woman that you had med in Alaska, leaving that child then in the care of her mother.
26 You told Ms Lechner that you had obtained employment as a security worker or crowd controller; that your marriage was under strain by 2007, at the time that you met Elise, and that since the relationship with Elise had ended, you had re-partnered. Your partner is a year younger than you and the two of you have a 12 month old daughter. You described your relationship with your partner as good and loving and you expressed devotion to your daughter. This is by and large consistent with the account of your history you gave to the other psychologist, Ms Durmaz.
27 Ms Lechner administered the Beck Depression Inventory. As she noted in her report, the Beck Depression Inventory is a self-report questionnaire that canvasses a range of psychological and physiological symptoms of depression experienced by the respondent over the two weeks immediately before the administration of the inventory. You score on the Beck Depression Inventory fell into the extreme range. Ms Lechner said this was consistent with your presentation at interview, and consistent with a diagnosis of clinical depression. She said that you evidenced symptoms of adjustment disorder with depression. She said that that was largely a function of your pending court hearing, because you had genuine concerns about your future prospects of employment and your ability to support your family.
28 Mr McQuillan told me in the course of the plea that you had left your employment as a crowd controller about 12 months ago, due to concerns about your future because of these pending charges, and you had been earning a meagre income since then, writing blogs and for online publications. Your partner, who is a project manager by training, has not returned to paid work since the child was born and plans to undertake a Master's degree in project management next year. It is not surprising, in those circumstances, that you do have concerns about your future prospects of employment and your ability to support yourself and your family.
29 Ms Durmaz, the psychologist, who you attended before the first plea hearing in 2013, also administered the Beck Depression Inventory to you, as well as the Beck Anxiety Inventory, and another tool, The Impact of Events Scale -Revised. All three are self-report instruments. When they were administered to you on 27 April 2013, your score on the Beck Depression Inventory again fell in the upper range. So did your score on the Beck Anxiety Inventory and your score on the Revised Impact of Events Scale.
30 Those scores indicated, in Ms Durmaz's opinion, that you were suffering from trauma symptoms as a result of childhood abuse and abandonment. And your score on the Impact of Events scale, she said was high enough to suppress your immune system functioning.
31 The description that she reported in her report that you had given her of your anxiety and its causes, that is as relating to your discovery well after the event, that Elise had been underage at the time you commenced your sexual relationship with her, is one that you now acknowledge to be false. So it is hard to place any great weight on the reliability of that score or any diagnosis made as a result of it.
32 I am simply not prepared to accept any opinion that you suffer depression or anxiety, based simply on these self-assessment questionnaires, and I note that, in any event, they are only designed to test symptoms in the previous two weeks and are not a proper basis for a clinical diagnosis of clinical depression or anxiety.
33 Any symptoms of adjustment disorder, and I note that Ms Lechner says you have symptoms of adjustment disorder, rather than diagnosing that you actually suffer from it, but any symptoms of adjustment disorder are, in my view, not capable of being seen as anything other than the understandable concerns that a person in your position, ultimately having to face punishment for acknowledged wrongdoing would be facing. It is not surprising that in the weeks leading up to a plea and sentencing hearing for serious offending, that the attention of the person facing the court is going to be focused on anxiety about family left behind, anxiety about their own fate and anxiety about the outcome.
34 You told Ms Lechner that you deeply regretted your actions and understood why such age limits are in place to protect younger people. She said that you acknowledged your role in the offences and made no attempt to shirk responsibility or to minimise the seriousness of your actions. She quoted you as saying, "If I'd been smart about it, I would have stayed friends and just seen what happened in the future." She said you said you felt remorse, because you felt that every day, although it was consensual, you should have been smarter, because Elise was not old enough to make that choice yet.
35 This account given to Ms Lechner, if a genuine reflection of your state of mind, is clearly reflective of a recently developed position, having regard to the course of this matter and the time at which your plea of guilty before me was entered. And also having regard to the content of your affidavit, the defence response and the account that you gave Ms Durmaz.
36 Ms Lechner concluded that you do not exhibit symptoms, or expressed the opinion, I should say, that you do not exhibit symptoms of psycho-sexual disorder per se. She said you appear to have developed an emotional bond with the complainant that became a romantic and sexual connection. She said that, based on what you told her, that you were aware at the time that your actions were wrong and that you had a good understanding as to why that was so. She expressed the opinion that you presented with a favourable prognosis and a low risk of further offending, and she said that your background was not at all suggestive of psycho-sexual deviancy.
37
Unfortunately, apart from the history provided by you and your administration of the Beck Depression Inventory, there is no reference in her report to any other tests or clinical tools employed by her to support her opinion that you are at low risk of further offending. The absence of any stated support for her opinion means that I cannot give it much weight. It is also apparent from
Ms Lechner's report that she was not provided with the report from
Ms Durmaz, to which I have referred.
38 There is no evidence from which I could find that you have a deviant sexual interest in prepubescent or pubescent girls. There is no basis upon which I could make a finding of paedophilia or paraphilia, nor is there any basis upon which I could make a positive finding excluding those possibilities. I am simply left in a neutral position. In any event, in circumstances such as this, labels such as paedophilia or paraphilia are of little assistance. As sometimes been said, a label is the start, not the end of any enquiry.
39 What I find concerning and relevant for sentencing purposes here is your preparedness to tell lies for you own advantage, as evidenced by your plea to Charge 2, the content of your affidavit, which by your guilty plea, you acknowledge to be deliberately untruthful, the account given by Ms Durmaz, which again, by your acknowledgment of the truthfulness of the content of the prosecution summary on plea, and what you told Ms Lechner about the circumstances of Charge 1, you acknowledge to be deliberately untruthful.
40 There is nothing in Ms Lechner's report about the circumstances of Charge 2, or any explanation advanced to you by that, and when I asked Mr McQuillan whether he wished to make any submissions specifically in respect of that, he said, "No". The plea was there, the admission was there and no exculpatory explanation or no expression of remorse was advanced on your behalf. That is in respect of Charge 2.
41 I was provided with a bundle of testimonials from your partner, her mother, and a number of friends and colleagues. All refer to your expressions of remorse. All deponents said they considered your expressions of remorse to be genuine, that you regretted your behaviour, and all expressed the opinion that your conduct was out of character with the man they know.
42 As the Court of Appeal said in Barbaro and Zirilli,[2] "Expressions of remorse conveyed to a court through a psychologist's report or in testimonials from friends and family, may not carry much weight." There is no evidence before me that you are remorseful, in the sense described by the court in Barbaro and Zirilli. I do not consider that in the circumstances, the expressions of remorse go beyond an expression of concern for the circumstances you now find yourself in, as a consequence of your own misconduct. And I do not consider therefore that your plea of guilty is, in the circumstances, evidence of remorse or that there is evidence of remorse which bears favourably upon your prospects for rehabilitation.
[2]Barbaro; Zirilli v The Queen [2012] VSCA 288.
43 It is clear from the material before me that you were attracted to Elise and she to you. Each of you considered that you were in a relationship and I accept that the sexual activity between you was consensual. That must be qualified because, of course, as a matter of law, Elise was not capable of consenting to such a relationship.
44 Whilst the absence of consent is an aggravating feature, when considering a charge of sexual penetration of a child under 16, consent to sexual penetration by a child under 16, who is by law incapable of consenting, is not a mitigating factor. If it was not abundantly clear before, it was made so by the observations of the Court of Appeal in Clarkson.[3]
[3]Clarkson v The Queen; EJA v The Queen [2011] VSCA 157.
45 There was, in my view, a considerable power imbalance in the relationship between you and Elise. You are ten years older than her and between 15 and 25, that can be a considerable difference. In your particular circumstances, I consider it was. Whatever had been the circumstances of your family upbringing in Alaska, it does appear that you did father a child at the age of 18, and it does appear that you did, for some time at least, you told Mr McQuillan a year, not two years, assumed primary care for that child. Since your departure for Australia, you have continued a level of paternal responsibility, maintaining contact with her.
46 You had, at the age of 20, left your home country and family, migrated to Australia and married. You had been working and responsible for your own support for up to ten years. Your occupation as a crowd controller is clearly one that gave you considerable experience in dealing with a wide range of people. There is a vast difference there for all between a 15 year old, Year 10 girl, attending a single-sex school in Melbourne and a man with the life experience that you presented with at the age of 25. And that is so no matter how tall she was, no matter how physically well-developed she appeared to be, and no matter how much she was expressing her right to exercise autonomy in respect of her own life.
47 It is clear, therefore, that subject to considerations of matters personal to you, that deterrence, particularly general deterrence, denunciation and just punishment are significant sentencing considerations. It is to be hoped that the deterrent aspect of being charged and of ultimately being confronted with the reality of your situation and pleading guilty, will have a significant specific deterrent effect on you.
48 The fact that you are now in what appears to be a stable relationship with a woman of about the same age, in an age appropriate relationship, have a young child to whom the two of you, you and your partner, express devotion and commitment to continued care, should also have significant deterrent aspects.
49 You have no previous convictions and no subsequent convictions for any like manner, and there are no pending charges for any like manner. That too should be a significant protective factor. So whilst there must be some weight to be given to specific deterrence, I do not consider, apart from the sentencing process itself, it needs to be particularly high.
50 Similarly, although I do not consider that there is evidence of remorse which is relevant to reinforce your prospects for rehabilitation, your absence of previous and subsequent convictions, your history of engaging in paid employment, the fact that you are in a stable relationship and accepting responsibility for that child, and that you have maintained contact with your older child in the United States, and the fact that you are assessed to be of reasonable intelligence and not suffering from any mental illness, substance abuse or any other matters which might set you back, all indicate that you have reasonable prospects for rehabilitation.
51 Nonetheless, the seriousness of this offending, the taking advantage of this child, and the being prepared, for as long as you were, to tell lies about it, all indicate that those other matters, denunciation, deterrence and just punishment must carry weight.
52 It would have been, as you said to Ms Lechner, no great sacrifice for you to wait for two months until this child turned 16, in which case you could have had, whilst there may still have been elements of age imbalance, and the capacity for exploitation that goes with that, a moral component only, not any illegal component.
53 There is nothing that has been said in mitigation of your telling lies to extract that money from her. As I said, it is a particularly pernicious lie to tell someone so much younger that you are suffering from a life threatening illness and that unless she is able to fund medication for you, you are going to be in terrible pain and unable to properly fund your treatment. It shows a level of manipulation and exploitation that is just shameful. And the fact that you maintained this whilst you knew she was studying for her VCE and that she wants to go to university and therefore to get a good ATAR, was an important factor for her, shows how much you were prepared, in that regard, to put your own interests ahead of hers.
54 To say, as you did, to each of Ms Durmaz and to Ms Lechner, each of you lent each other money, shows how little you were prepared, even by the time you spoke to Ms Lechner, to understand and accept your moral responsibility and your moral culpability for that misconduct.
55 I have come to the view that in the circumstances, no sentence, other than one of imprisonment, with a component of immediate service, is appropriate.
56 Having regard to your circumstances and what I have said about your reasonable prospects for rehabilitation, and the fact that I consider that there is no need for an extra weighting for specific deterrence, beyond the process of conviction and sentencing itself, I propose to impose a sentence directing part of it to be served immediately and the balance to be suspended.
57 I do that because I do not consider you are a person who is in need of other supervision that is required - or that is given under parole that it is often needed by people less able than you to be able to manage themselves and their own affairs. It also gives you the benefit of date certainty of release, which is something a person sentenced to a term of imprisonment with a non-parole period fixed does not get. So that is what I see to be an advantage, a positive benefit in the structuring of the sentence that way, rather than imposing a non-parole period.
58 Under the terms of the Sex Offender Registration Act, Charge 1 is a Class 1 offence and you are therefore required to be subject to the reporting conditions of that Act for a period of 15 years. I am require to provide you with a copy of the reporting conditions. I will ask Mr McQuillan to take that down to you now and give it to you. There is a provision on that for you to sign a receipt, acknowledging that you have been given it. You do not have to sign the receipt, the record of this proceeding will show, in any event, that you have been provided with it.
59 The prosecution has also made request for the provision of a forensic sample. And I propose to make that order, having regard to the seriousness of the circumstances of the offending - I did not ask you, Mr McQuillan, if that was consented to or not opposed.
60 MR McQUILLAN: No, it's not opposed, Your Honour.
61 HER HONOUR: And this is not opposed, thank you.
62 I must warn you, Mr Rutherford, I am making that order for the taking of a sample by way of buccal sample, that is a scraping from the inside of your mouth. I must warn you that if you do not consent to or co-operate in the provision of that sample, then the police are authorised to use reasonable force to obtain it and may well use a more invasive means of obtaining it, namely the taking of a blood sample. Do you understand that?
63 OFFENDER: I do.
64 HER HONOUR: Right, thank you, if you could take that reporting conditions down now.
65 MR McQUILLAN: Yes, Your Honour.
66 HER HONOUR: Now there is no pre-sentence detention, is there?
67 MR McQUILLAN: No, Your Honour.
68 HER HONOUR: And no other ancillary orders?
69 MR McQUILLAN: No, Your Honour.
70 HER HONOUR: James Rutherford, on the two charges to which you have pleaded guilty, you are convicted.
71 On Charge 1, you are sentenced to be imprisoned for a period of 15 months.
72 On Charge 2, you are sentenced to be imprisoned for a period of three months, and I direct that that be served cumulatively upon the sentence on Charge 1.
73 That makes a total effective sentence of 18 months. You are to serve 12 months of that and six months of that is to be suspended for a period of six months.
74 I declare, pursuant to s.6AAA of the Sentencing Act, that but for you pleas of guilty, I would have sentenced you to a total effective sentence of 2 years imprisonment, and I would have fixed a period of 18 months as the time that you are required to be served, before suspending the balance of six months for six months.
75 Orders that I have pronounced reflect what I said I intended to do?
76 MR McQUILLAN: As Your Honour pleases.
77 MR SHAW: Yes, Your Honour.
78 HER HONOUR: Yes, thank you. Could you remove Mr Rutherford please.
79 Thank you both for your assistance throughout this.
80 COUNSEL: As Your Honour pleases.
81 HER HONOUR: Adjourn.
- - -
0
2
0