Director of Public Prosecutions v Thompson
[2017] VCC 970
•18 July 2017
| IN THE COUNTY COURT OF VICTORIA | Revised Not Restricted Suitable for Publication |
AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL DIVISION
CR-16-01568
Ind G10295930
| DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS |
| V |
| WAYNE ROBERT THOMPSON |
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JUDGE: | HIS HONOUR JUDGE TINNEY | |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne | |
DATE OF HEARING: | Trial: 5 June-14 June; verdict 14 June 2017; | |
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 18 July 2017 | |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | DPP v Thompson | |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2019] VCC 970 | |
REASONS FOR SENTENCE
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Catchwords: Administer drug for the purposes of sexual penetration; Rape.
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APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the Crown | Mr McKenry (Trial) Mr Nibbs (Plea) | Office of Public Prosecutions |
| For the Accused | Mr Cameron | Dribbin and Brown |
HIS HONOUR:
Wayne Robert Thompson, following a short trial, on 14 June 2017 you were found guilty of one charge of administering a drug for the purposes of sexual penetration and one charge of rape. The administering a drug charge carries a ten-year maximum term of imprisonment. The rape charge carries a 25 year maximum term of imprisonment.
You have a criminal history going back some years but it is of very little relevance to my task.
Facts
Your victim who I will not identify in my sentencing reasons is now 42 years of age. At the time of the offending she was a 39 year-old resident of Port Macquarie, New South Wales and had come to visit you in Melbourne. Your date of birth is 1 June 1977 and it follows that you are now 40 years of age. You were 37 years of age at the time of the offences. You were then residing at Ozanam House.
The charges on the indictment relate to your acts on 29 August 2014 where you have caused the drug doxylamine to be taken by your victim with the requisite intention and then committed penile/vaginal rape upon her. Both acts occurred at 57 Hubert Avenue, Glenroy. This matter proceeded as a contested trial. In dispute was the happening of either of the acts. Plainly the jury has accepted the complainant’s account of what took place at that house on that day.
A Statement of Agreed Facts dated 5 June 2017, was marked as Exhibit “A” and read to the jury in the course of the trial. It conveniently summarised the scientific evidence in a simple fashion and established that the forensic medical examination conducted by Dr Kashyap upon your victim on
29 August 2014 and the subsequent forensic analysis disclosed that there was extremely strong support for your being the contributor to the DNA located on the swabs taken from your victim’s vagina. In short there was semen found on the high vaginal swab. A blood sample taken from your victim disclosed the presence of the drug doxylamine, a drug that your victim had not knowingly taken.
Background to offending
Your victim gave evidence to the jury as to what took place on the day of the offences as well as the circumstances in which the two of you came to meet. She said that you became friends on Facebook in June 2014 and that you started chatting online before exchanging phone numbers and then speaking on the phone. There was some dispute as to some of the discussions leading to her arrival in Victoria. I am satisfied beyond reasonable doubt of your victim’s account that in the days leading up to her arrival in Victoria you had told her that your brother had attempted to commit suicide in Newcastle; You told her that you were going to Newcastle and that you asked her to meet you there for support. Whilst she thought it probably was not a good time to meet your family, she in fact arranged to go to Newcastle to support you because you sounded so upset on the telephone. You never made it to Newcastle, despite saying that you and your sister would be meeting your victim at the train station.
You told your victim that you could not get a flight from Melbourne and following further discussions, she arranged to come down to Melbourne to see you. You had not met in person to that point but she was concerned for your welfare.
There is no dispute that when your victim arrived in Melbourne on 28 August 2014, you met her at Southern Cross Station and you then showed her around Melbourne that day. You had initially told her that you could not go back to your house because the police were there as there had been a stabbing the night before. You later took her to the laneway next to Ozanam House. What your victim did not know was that you had no house. You were in fact living at Ozanam House. She did not reside in Melbourne and did not know what that place was (that is she did not know it was a refuge for homeless men). You, at one point, took a tram back into the city and then a train out to Glenroy. By that stage you had teed up some accommodation with a friend.
On Thursday, 28 August 2014 (“the first night”), you and your victim stayed at your friends' house at 23 View Street Glenroy. Those friends were Sarah Hannah and her partner John Campbell. You and your victim shared a bed in the spare bedroom that night. You tried to initiate sexual contact in the bedroom that night but your victim rejected you, saying that she did not want to have sex with you straight away. She said no and you rolled over and said, "Okay".
On Friday, 29 August 2014, you and your victim walked to the house of another of your friends, this time a property occupied by Shannon Beecroft and Jason Natrass. That house was at 57 Hubert Avenue Glenroy. You, your associates and your victim went out together, at one stage visiting Cash Converter’s in Glenroy, where Mr Natrass’ laptop was pawned. Upon returning to 57 Hubert Avenue, you were left alone with your victim in the lounge room. She had to that point made very plain to you her attitude to drugs. That she did not take them. You then offered to make her a cup of coffee. You brought her the coffee in a white mug. At that stage she was fully clothed. After about the third or fourth mouthful of coffee, and after some time, your victim felt a bit lightheaded. The next thing she remembers is waking up. Not just waking up but waking up with you on top of her, penetrating her vagina with your penis. Her tights had been removed and her underpants were down around her ankles. You had no lower garments on at all. When your victim asked you what you were doing and told you to get off, you told her aggressively to "Shut up and don’t move". You had her arms pinned up against her shoulders by her wrists and she kneed you in the stomach to get you off her. That white mug was still on the coffee table when she left the premises. A white mug was located by police in the kitchen sink the next day. She described the steps she took to report your conduct, going to a convenience store and asking the attendant there and then a taxi driver where the nearest police station was and ultimately, having got no success from either of those people, walking along the street and bursting into tears and being assisted by a woman she found in the front yard of a property. The matter was reported to the police that very day.
Evidence was led before the jury as to the potential impact of the drug doxylamine. It is an over the counter drug, an anti-histamine but one with a potentially strong sedative effect especially when taken by someone who is not used to taking it. It can produce instant sleep in some cases. That drug was found in your victim’s system and was not one taken knowingly by her.
You chose to give evidence at the trial. You suggested that her arrival at Southern Cross station was a great surprise and totally out of the blue.
Of course, the Facebook messages made clear enough that this was not the position at all. As to the events immediately surrounding the charges, you denied making her a coffee or causing her to take any drug at all. You chopped and changed as to whether there was any sexual act in the period when your victim was down in Melbourne but you were definitive in your evidence that there was no sexual activity at all at Hubert Avenue. Well of course the jury has rejected your account. There was a troublesome police interview conducted with you on 30 August 2014. Troublesome for you in that at times you seemingly denied any sexual contact with your victim at all. This was a problem given the forensic evidence in this case. In that interview you had described what had taken place on the first night and essentially denied that there had been any sexual act at all. You said there had been a discussion where you had told her you were not “on the same page”. Paragraph [21] of the Defence Response to the Summary of Prosecution Opening stated that you did not recall having intercourse with your victim on the first night (the 28th) at the time you were interviewed, but that it was entirely possible that you did have consensual intercourse with her at View Street. Your counsel verbally delivered that response following the prosecution opening to the jury.
The complainant had denied any sexual act on the first night and the only other occasion for the deposit of semen was, of course, the day of the rape. You and your counsel obviously took the view that you needed to give evidence and somehow try to explain the presence of the semen. To give some plausible account of the DNA evidence led in this case. Hence you gave evidence. It was a very unsatisfactory account. Your evidence appeared to morph from the “possibility” of consensual sexual contact having occurred on the 28th to the certainty of that act having taken place. Even when giving evidence in chief, your evidence was disastrous. Your own counsel put to you the complainant’s suggestion that there had not been any sex on the first night and asked you what your position was. You stated that you believed that to be a lie. You went on to say that you were not 100% sure there had been sex on that first night. In examination in chief, when asked questions by your own counsel, you had no ability to in any way describe the act or even to say definitely whether the act had occurred the night before. At a later stage in cross examination, by this stage, the following day, you gave a detailed description of an act that the day before you had said was at best a possibility. On more than one occasion when asked to comment on why you could not remember the event, you returned to an unfortunate sentiment that had been expressed in the interview namely that if the sex was not that good you would not have remembered it. The less said about your evidence the better. It has clearly been entirely rejected by the jury.
The jury has found that you did in fact administer the drug found in your victim’s system with the requisite intent. You then raped her. The basis of the rape is the failure to withdraw though of course there is not the slightest suggestion even from you that she ever consented to any sexual act at Hubert Avenue or that you thought she had. This sexual act was without a condom.
I want to make plain that though I accept beyond reasonable doubt the complainant’s account of the background to her coming to Melbourne, that is in no way used to find against you that you had any longstanding evil or criminal intentions towards this woman. I am sure you did not. I am sure people very often say things in online posts and on social media that are false or misleading or maybe do not contain the whole truth. It happens all the time . I am sure you did describe to your victim an attempted suicide by your brother. I am sure you did arrange for her to meet you In Newcastle. I am equally confident you misled her as to your true residential position upon her arrival, but I am certainly not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that at any of these stages you had any plan to drug and/or rape her or to commit any crime at all upon her. So those matters are in no way aggravating in this case. Your plan may well have been formulated very close to the event, though undoubtedly there was a plan given the guilty finding on Charge 1 and the requisite intent found by the jury. Your counsel concedes as much.
This was undoubtedly very serious offending, drugging a woman intending to render her incapable of resistance and then having unprotected sex with her in that vulnerable state.
Victim Impact statement
Your victim has made a victim impact statement dated 28 June 2017. It was read to me yesterday in the course of the plea. Of course I have read it again overnight and again today. It is a very sensible, cogent and economical account of the impact of your crimes. It is hardly surprising that your crimes have very deeply impacted upon her life. She has had episodes of depression and anxiety. She felt violated and unworthy. She has tried to take her own life since these events. She has nightmares and decreased motivation. She blames herself but plainly she should not. Her only “fault” was to be a trusting person, a person taking you at face value. That is hardly a fault but it was a characteristic exploited by you. She has lost trust in others owing to your exploiting her trust in you. She is determined that your crimes are not going ruin her life and that is a commendable approach but that there has been a sizable impact upon her is not disputed in any way by your counsel. So I take into account, as I am obliged to, the significant impact of your crimes upon your victim in this case.
Mitigation
I turn then to the matters that have been raised in the plea in mitigation.
Your counsel raised a handful of matters in mitigation. They were not numerous and included:·The absence of any relevant history;
·Delay;
Mr Cameron, who conducted the plea yesterday, placed before me a report from a psychologist Mr Simmons and took me to your background, arguing that you had good prospects of rehabilitation.
He conceded the seriousness of the offending, the inevitability of terms of imprisonment and cumulation between sentences and the fixing of a total effective sentence of a dimension requiring the fixing of a non-parole period.
Prosecution
The prosecutor Mr Nibbs really was not required to make submissions as to the offending. This is generally the sign of a sensibly pitched plea in mitigation which Mr Cameron's was. Mr Nibbs made some concession as to the mitigatory effect of delay in that there were no offences committed in the interim which have been, to this point, dealt with by a Court. There had been some earlier committed offences dealt with subsequently and there are some outstanding matters listed but yet to be heard.
Background
Before turning to consider these various matters, I turn very briefly to your background. Your counsel relied upon the background set out in the expert report placed before me. I am prepared to accept the family and developmental background placed before me. It is referred to in great detail in the report of
Mr Simmons and I see no utility in slavishly repeating it in my sentencing reasons. There is no doubt at all that your early childhood and adolescence were tough indeed. You were raised in an abusive relationship until your parents separated when you were ten and by then much I am sure much damage had been done to you with disrupted schooling produced by movement from State to State so that your father could keep one step ahead of the law. You witnessed domestic violence inflicted upon your mother and suffered both violence and sexual abuse at the hands of your own father. There were later instances of sexual abuse committed upon you by a family friend towards the end of your primary schooling. You had a learning disability of some description at school and only went as far as year 9. There were then many years of unemployment and then what appears to be a pretty sporadic employment history. You have spent a number of years on the disability support pension, I am told for mental health issues.
Drugs and alcohol have been an issue in your life for many years. There is far greater detail in Mr Simmon’s report as to many of these matters as well as discussion of your relationship history but I see no need to restate this material. I do take into account your unenviable and disadvantaged background in so far as I am permitted to take it into account in mitigation of sentence.
Now part of that background is the criminal history that has been placed before me. You have that history, it spans a number of years and you have been given opportunities by the courts. You have not always taken them. You have also been sent to prison on occasions in the past. However, none of the prior matters are of any great relevance to my task in passing sentence in this case. Some are for dishonesty, drug use or driving offences. Of more concern are the assaults and stalking/domestic violence related offending. However what is clear is there is not any past sexual offending at all so the criminal history is only of very limited or marginal relevance to my task.
You have been in custody since verdict and it has been unpleasant to date, with two assaults occurring following on from your refusal to do things asked of you in custody. Inmates were evidently prevailing upon you to join them in the commission of crimes. You declined and there was swift punishment. Now your counsel was not suggesting there is any increased custodial burden to be found in this case. Indeed he explicitly disavowed any such suggestion. He placed before me a document indicating you were being kept in protection but it was not being suggested that you are likely to be segregated throughout your sentence or that any of the matters referred to in the report of Mr Simmons increases your custodial burden. He raised the assaults upon you more as demonstrating your strong resolve to buckle down and rehabilitate whilst in custody.
Delay
I turn now to the issue of delay. Your counsel initially was not really arguing that delay had much if any mitigatory role to play here. However I was faced with the dates and needed to understand why there was such a delay in the finalisation of the matter. I endeavoured to tease out what, if anything, the Court was to make of the delay and ultimately your counsel argued that it could be given some limited weight. The offences occurred, as I have said, on 29 August 2014. The complainant went to the police on the day, as I have said. You were interviewed on 30 August 2014 and you were released pending further enquires. Those further enquires no doubt related to the scientific evidence in the case. I was told by your counsel that you remained in Victoria for some eight months but then relocated interstate. There is no suggestion of your fleeing the jurisdiction or anything like that. You had not been charged. You were not on bail. You left as you were entirely free to. By the time police had determined to charge you, you could not be located. They liaised with police in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. You were arrested on the charge and warrant in January 2016 and were then extradited to this State.
You remained in custody for about a month before being bailed. However it is not suggested that there had to that point been any anxiety produced by the prospect of being charged or any sense of uncertainty in your mind following the interview. So your life had not been held in suspense. As your counsel put it, you had just got on with your life and heard nothing more until the warrant was executed in January 2016. From that point, there was an unexceptional chronology. You exercised your rights to run a committal in September 2016 and then a trial. Well those were your rights. You have had some uncertainty in your life once extradited until the trial was completed and I do take that into account. More significantly, there is the evidence touching upon your ongoing rehabilitation in the period of the delay. You have stayed out of trouble for a handful of years. I cannot have regard to the outstanding matters listed in August of this year as the issue of your guilt or otherwise remains to be determined. The matter dealt with at Seymour Magistrates’ Court in February 2015 involved offences which predated the crimes for which I must pass sentence. It follows then that you have stayed out of trouble. So the delay is mitigatory in this case and I take it into account in the manner ultimately argued by your counsel.
Rehabilitation
As to your prospects of rehabilitation, your counsel argued that they were good. He relied upon your background and the absence of any related past offending. He highlighted the presence of some family support. Your sister and your partner were present yesterday for the plea. Your partner is back here again today. Indeed your partner was here throughout the currency of the trial. So your counsel was relying upon the limited criminal history and the risk assessment in the report of Mr Simmons as suggesting that the offending was out of character. I accept that it was out of character.
The problem is your offending was not opportunistic. It had at least some level of planning as your counsel concedes and your offending was very serious.
In reaching judgments as to risk of re-offence and your prospects of rehabilitation, quite aside from the out of character nature of this offending, I am entitled to have regard to the deterrent effect of your being arrested and charged and then the service of the sizeable term of imprisonment which you will necessarily have to serve. Your counsel was arguing that despite your past history before the Courts and your relatively long term use or abuse of alcohol and drugs, that you had good prospects of rehabilitation and a relatively low risk of re-offence. I am prepared to act on the moderate-low expert risk assessment conducted by Mr Simmons. I believe that you have reasonably or quite good prospects of rehabilitation.
As to the report of Mr Simmons, your counsel was not suggesting that any of the principles from the case of Verdins were enlivened in this case. He specifically said that they were not and I am sure that concession was correctly made. Still the report is of value setting out as it does your unfortunate background and the opinion of Mr Simmons as to your future risks. I take into account the report in the ways urged upon me by your counsel.
Current Sentencing Practices
I do take into account, as I am obliged to, current sentencing practices. I have looked at the Sentencing Advisory Council Snapshot No. 207 of 2017 for rape. I note that prison terms when imposed ranged from a term of three months combined with a community corrections order to up to 11 years imprisonment with the median principal sentence of imprisonment for rape being five years, the most common sentence falling between four to less than five years with 48 such sentences. However there are a sizeable collection of sentences that are higher, some far higher, including 45 instances of sentences of between five and six years, 18 instances of sentences of between six to seven years and 14 sentences of between eight to nine years. The average sentence increased over the course of the data covered by that snapshot, to five years and three months.
I have also looked at the materials available at the Judicial College Sentencing Manual, including the collection of cases dealing with the crime of rape.
I have also considered some cases dealing with the offence of administering a drug. They are harder to find. It is a rarer crime. There is no sentencing snapshot for that offence. So I have looked at cases such as Balassis v The Queen [2010] VSCA 296 and DPP v Morris and Brooke [2015] VSCA 155. Also DPP v TDJ [2009] VSCA 317.
Having mentioned the statistics and these other cases let me make plain what I hope I made plain yesterday in the course of the plea; No case is ever identical. There is always an inherent limitation in viewing statistical data whether it is the median, the average or even the most common sentence imposed. Statistical material says nothing at all as to the particular background of the offender. It says nothing at all about the nature of the crime, the nature of the penetration or the existence or otherwise of aggravating features. It says nothing at all as to the context of the offending. Statistical material says nothing as to whether a matter proceeded by way of trial or plea or whether there is remorse or not. Your convictions follow a trial. You have no remorse at all. The setting is a serious one.
Sentencing purposes
I must take into account a large number of matters in passing sentence in this case as indeed in every case. I must take into account the impact of your crimes. I must take into account the maximum penalties at play. You must be punished for your conduct though I must do that justly and proportionately. The court must manifest it’s denunciation of your serious offending. I do. You should be ashamed of yourself. You are not.
Despite the relatively favourable conclusions I have reached as to you having a relatively low risk of re-offence and reasonably good prospects of rehabilitation, I still must pay some regard to the need to deter you from offending in the future. You must be deterred from ever contemplating committing these sorts of serious crimes in the years ahead, though I do agree that the purpose can be moderated to a degree given your past lack of any highly relevant criminal offending and the judgment that I have made as your having relatively favourable future prospects of rehabilitation.
I must also pay regard to the need to protect the community from you. For the same reasons, I think that purpose can be moderated to a degree though it cannot be ignored given the premeditated nature of these crimes. Though you have committed offences in the past, you have not presented any great risk to the community over the course of your life and I act on the basis of the risk assessment placed before me. Your risk of re-offence is, in my judgment, relatively low. I take into account your prospects of rehabilitation. As I say, I think they are reasonably good.
I have already spoken of the need to deter you from future offending. That is the concept that us lawyers refer to as the principle of specific deterrence. It is clear that I must pay strong regard to another principle at play in this case, that is the principle of general deterrence. That is a very significant purpose of sentencing in this sort of case. By general deterrence, I mean the court’s obligation to send a clear message to other people in the community that offending such as yours will not be tolerated. Repeatedly our highest court in this State, the Court of Appeal has spoken of the seriousness of the crime of rape especially the rape of vulnerable victims. I suppose your victim was vulnerable enough when she came to Victoria. Vulnerable as she was so trusting in you and was so far from home and otherwise alone. But she became far more vulnerable when you drugged her. You administered the drug to render her incapable of resisting your sexual advances. Advances which you knew had been rejected the night before. When you raped her she was vulnerable.
The seriousness with which Parliament views the offence of rape can be determined from the maximum penalty applying to it. Twenty-five years’ imprisonment is the maximum term of imprisonment fixed by the legislature. As I have said, that maximum is one of the factors that I must have regard to under the provisions of the Sentencing Act 1991.
Your counsel conceded the existence of a number of matters of aggravation. Firstly, he accepted, as he had to, that this offending occurred when the victim was vulnerable. Of course you rendered her vulnerable. You produced that state courtesy of your conduct the subject of Charge 1. That vulnerable person is the person you then raped. It cannot be said that this was opportunistic offending or a momentary poor judgment or decision as sometimes is the position. You created the opportunity by secretly administering a drug to a woman you knew had rejected you sexually the night before. Then you had unprotected penile/vaginal sex to the point of ejaculation with this woman whom you had rendered incapable of resistance.
Now I have to take care to avoid double punishment in this sort of case. I must ensure that the criminal culpability associated with Charge 1 administering a drug is considered separately from the second charge of rape. See Balassis paragraphs 80-84. See also TDJ v DPP [2009] VSCA 317.
Your counsel conceded that the fact of the rape being unprotected was also a matter of aggravation in this case. It is. The aggravation lay in the risk of disease and/or pregnancy owing to the unprotected nature of that penetration.
It seems to me then that this crime of rape stands in a very different position to one where there is some opportunistic taking of advantage or momentary poor judgment, as serious as those things are. Maybe even some disinhibition on the part of the offender. Well that is not the position here. You were, on the day in question, acting quite deliberately and with intent by secretly causing your victim to ingest a drug. Your conduct was predatory. That is the conduct covered by Charge 1. As to the rape, well it involved unprotected penetration by you of a drug affected person. She was at the time of the rape, for all intents and purposes, unconscious. She was vulnerable and known by you to be vulnerable. This person was a person who to your knowledge had rejected sexual activity with you the night before. A person who trusted you.
One can almost always imagine worse instances of crimes. That is because sadly we as Judges sitting up here, often enough see crimes with features of aggravation coming before the Court. For instance the use of weapons or joint or sustained conduct or significant and/or gratuitous violence or threats, or conduct that is designed to humiliate and degrade. Those sorts of matters of aggravation that sometimes exist, do not exist here.
As your counsel correctly conceded though, there are some features of aggravation present here.
The fact is rape is always a serious criminal offence, however it is committed. I am required to consider the nature and gravity of the offence for which I must pass sentence. As I hope I have made clear enough, I judge this rape to be a serious example indeed of the crime of rape, given the particular circumstances mentioned to date in these reasons including, of course, the clear vulnerability of your victim. You had administered a drug with the required intention. That is the subject of Charge 1. That was very serious conduct in its own right. The rape which followed was of a person who was powerless to resist you. It was therefore, in my judgment, an act of high moral culpability. This was extremely serious offending.
You have none of the sentencing benefits that often enough would apply to those covered by the statistical data that I have mentioned. For instance a person who demonstrates remorse and who pleads guilty at an early stage. Those benefits are very sizeable indeed in a sexual case as they should be. They have no application here. You have chosen to run a trial. It was your right to do that and you are not to be punished for taking this stance but it follows that there are a number of sizeable mitigatory matters that apply often enough in other cases which simply have no application at all in your case.
Your offending was very serious. It demands a very substantial term of imprisonment.
Totality
The two offences occurred in the one episode. However they have differing elements and there must be, as your counsel concedes, some measure of cumulation. Charge 1 itself was, as I say, very serious conduct in its own right even if nothing else had occurred. However what occurred then was the commission of the rape, the rape of your vulnerable victim. I have taken a last look at the overall effect of the sentence shortly to be pronounced to ensure that it is commensurate with your overall criminality and is not crushing upon you. Your criminality though was very high. This was very serious offending and offending with a sizeable impact upon your victim.
Disposal order
Application is made for a disposal order. You consent through your counsel to the making of the order. I have signed the order and now pronounce it. I am satisfied of those matters referred to in the document and listed in s.77 of the Confiscation Act. It is appropriate to make this order. That the property referred to in the Schedule was used or intended to be used in or in connection of the commission of the offence. I order pursuant to s.78 of the Confiscation Act, the forfeiture to the State of the property referred to in the Schedule and I direct it to be handled and dealt with in the manner described in the document which I have signed.
Sentence
On Charge 1, that is the charge of administering a drug for the purposes of sexual penetration, I convict and sentence you to two years’ and nine months imprisonment.
On Charge 2, a charge of rape, I convict and sentence you to seven years’ imprisonment. That is the base sentence.
Cumulation
I direct that nine months of the sentence imposed on Charge 1 is to be served cumulatively upon the base sentence.
Total Effective Sentence
This results in a total effective sentence of seven years’ and nine months imprisonment
NPP
I fix a period of five years and nine months during which you will not be eligible for release on parole.
Section 18
You went into custody upon the execution of a warrant on 26 January 2016. Following extradition, you were bailed on 22 February of that same year. So that was a period of 28 days in custody referrable to this matter. Additionally you have been in custody since verdict on 14 June 2017. That is a period of 34 days. I order pursuant to the provisions of s.18 of the Sentencing Act that this period of 62 days, has already been served by way of pre-sentence detention under this sentence. That declaration is to be entered in the records of the court.
Grab a seat please. Are there any other matters or any matters that I have overlooked at all?
MR LEW: No, Your Honour.
MR WANG: No, Your Honour.
HIS HONOUR: Yes all right . Are you going to go down and see your client downstairs or not?
MR WANG: I will.
HIS HONOUR: Yes, all right . There are no custody management issues that I need to highlight?
Mr WANG: No, Your Honour.
HIS HONOUR: All right. Grab a seat then, Mr Thompson.
(Orders signed.)
Yes all right, look, I have signed that order. All right, Mr Thompson can be removed please.
(Prisoner removed.)
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