Director of Public Prosecutions v Whitehouse
[2022] VCC 568
•2 May 2022
| IN THE COUNTY COURT OF VICTORIA | Revised Not Restricted Suitable for Publication |
AT GEELONG
CRIMINAL DIVISION
CR 21-02427
Indictment No. M10053323
| DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS |
| v |
| Brett WHITEHOUSE |
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JUDGE: | HIS HONOUR JUDGE TINNEY | |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne | |
DATE OF HEARING: | 29 April 2022 | |
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 2 May 2022 | |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | DPP v Whitehouse | |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2022] VCC 568 | |
REASONS FOR SENTENCE
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Catchwords: Intentionally Causing Imjury, criminal damage, cultivation of cannabis (non-commercial quantity). Summary offences possess prohibited weapon and also possess controlled weapon. 48 years old at time, 49 at sentence, Lengthy criminal history including for violence offences. Attack with a chainsaw; Early guilty plea. Worboyes v The Queen [2021] VSCA 169; COVID-19.
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APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the Crown | Mr A. Moore | Office of Public Prosecutions |
| For the Accused | Mr N. Goodfellow | Emma Turnbull |
HIS HONOUR:
1 Brett Whitehouse, last Friday, (29 April 2022) you pleaded guilty to one charge of intentionally causing injury, one charge of criminal damage and one charge of cultivation of cannabis in a non-commercial quantity. You also pleaded guilty to two summary weapons offences.
2 You have a lengthy and relevant criminal history. You were 48 years of age at the time of the offending and you are 49 years old now.
3 You have been in custody since your arrest on 7 January of 2021.
4 The summary correctly sets out the maximum penalties. The maximum penalty referred to for the cultivation of cannabis proceeds on the assumption that you have satisfied the court on the balance of probabilities that the cultivation was not committed for any purpose related to trafficking in that plant. I am so satisfied and will scarcely mention the cultivation again. It is really the least of your problems.
Facts
5
Mr Moore appeared to prosecute on the plea and relied upon a written summary of prosecution opening dated 1 February 2022. Your counsel
Mr Goodfellow told me it was an agreed statement. That document was marked as Exhibit A on the plea. There were also some photos of the injuries marked as Exhibit B. The chainsaw is also captured in photographs which are part of the depositional material. There is no need for those to be marked.
6 As it is an agreed summary, I see no need at all to set out the full sentencing facts in these my reasons.
7 I will sentence pursuant to that agreed summary.
8
By way only of very brief summary then, on the day of the offences there had been an altercation between your son Jacob and your ultimate victim Mr James Stone. It is clear enough your son was not an innocent party in that altercation. Quite the opposite actually. He had in fact stabbed
Mr Stone and Mr Stone responded but your son reported (and probably misreported) the encounter to you in the course of a phone call. You should have told him to come home. Instead, you foolishly attended yourself. More foolishly still, you had chosen to carry a chainsaw with you, one which you then employed in a pretty extraordinary attack upon your victim as he sought to avoid conflict in the bathroom. You cut him with that weapon, causing him a number of wounds, referred to in paragraph 10. I ignore the reference in your interview to stabbing him with a knife when the chainsaw jammed. As I say, I will sentence pursuant to the agreed summary. That summary sets out how this all ended. Your victim was assisted by people at the scene and was taken to hospital. It is a matter of good fortune that he was not more seriously injured. The wounds were, relatively speaking, superficial.
9 You were arrested the next day and police who arrested you found a couple of plants under hydroponic cultivation hence Charge 3 on the indictment. They also found on your person the nunchakus. In fact, you disclosed that they were on your person. A spear was also found at the house.
10 You were interviewed by the police and you were co-operative. You made full admissions for which you now must get credit. You indicated you were acting in the way that you did as you believed the victim had hurt your son. For what it is worth, there is no material before me at all indicating any significant outcome for your son in this event, in terms of any injury. None at all. You also told the police that there had been some history between you and the victim preceding this event where you had been assaulted in company. You said you had had enough of him (see Question 66). You recognised you had overreacted and had not acted appropriately.
11 Your son was charged with some offences (referred to in paragraph 2 of the opening) and received a term of 207 days' imprisonment. Your son was not wielding a chainsaw, was a good deal younger than you and had nothing like your criminal history so parity of sentence, though mentioned in the written submissions, was explicitly abandoned in the running of the plea. Your son's prior history was placed before me and marked as Exhibit C. I will say a little bit more about this issue later in these reasons though probably I do not need to.
12 So much then for my short summary of the summary. I sentence pursuant to the more detailed agreed written statement which, as I say, was marked as Exhibit A.
Impact
13 There is no impact statement here. Your victim declined the opportunity to provide one. It was however obvious that this was a frightening attack. Your victim who is plainly hardly pro-police was only induced to make a statement owing to the ferocity and the seriousness of this attack upon him. He will never forget this event. I take into account the impact of the crimes.
In Mitigation
14
Your counsel Mr Goodfellow conducted a very thorough plea on your behalf and he relied upon a written outline dated 13 April as well as a report from a psychologist Gina Cidoni. There was also a letter from your daughter Ebony Steel and some course certificates. Finally, a letter from your
long term employer Joshua Kent.
15 These materials supplemented by the oral submissions more than adequately informed the court as to your personal and family background and your educational and employment history. Mr Goodfellow made submissions about your prospects of rehabilitation. He made submissions as to the relative gravity of the offending and the relevant sentencing principles that came into play. He retreated from those written submissions in terms of the parity issue as well as in any suggestion of the offence being truly spontaneous.
16 It was a very sensibly conducted plea.
17 He relied upon the following matters in mitigation:
· Your cooperative stance with the police coupled with an early guilty plea in the midst of the global pandemic.
· The presence of remorse.
· The impacts of COVID-19 upon your custodial experience to date and to a lesser degree into the future.
· The delay in the matter being finalised.
18 Mr Goodfellow argued that the time served to date would represent an appropriate sentence. That submission was very optimistic for reasons which I will explain.
Prosecution
19 The prosecution was calling for a prison term with a non-parole period.
Background
20 I turn then to your background. I am not going to descend into the fine detail of your personal background. That is because I have no reason to doubt the details of your personal and family background. Those details have been placed before me in the written submissions as well as in the expert report of Dr Cidoni and I see no utility in just rehashing it all in these reasons.
21 You were born and raised as an only child up in Queensland. A ‘normal and happy upbringing’ is the way you have described it. You completed year 9 and you have had over the years a good employment record in a range of fields. You have worked for one local plumbing company for many years. There is a very useful reference from Mr Kent. You have lived in Geelong since 1994. You have had no significant health issues.
22 Your mother died about 20 years ago. Your father died more recently. You had a long-term relationship with Fiona and have three sons and a daughter. That relationship ended in 2015 and the sudden end of that relationship set you back very significantly. You spoke of that with a level of emotion in the course of the police interview. You have had long terms issues with cannabis. You still have relationships with your children. You have been in a relationship with a Ms Jones for some time now. I was told that you have accommodation and a job available to you upon your release. The reference confirms the existence of a job.
23 There is a very strong reference from your daughter Ebony which, as these things often do, makes it very clear you are far more than just the person who has committed these crimes. You have some real qualities and she speaks of those in that reference. She is 27 years of age and she talks of the positive impact that you have had on her life and the lives of her three younger brothers. The way that you have provided for them and loved them in the course of their lives. Now, of course, one of those boys is Jacob who is 23, and who was involved in the earlier altercation with Mr Stone. The other two boys are, as I understand it, 16 and 17 years of age.
24 You have a lengthy and relevant criminal history; you know that. There is little utility in my going line by line through that history. There are a number of violence offences including some which were obviously serious. In 1996 in the District Court of South Australia, you were sent to prison for four and a half years for an assault occasioning actual bodily harm and unlawful wounding. In the District Court in Brisbane in 1990 you were imprisoned for assault occasioning actual bodily harm whilst armed with an offensive weapon.
25
In Victoria you have received prison sentences for recklessly causing injury and assault with a weapon in 2001, and for recklessly causing injury and recklessly causing serious injury in 2003. In the County Court of Victoria in November 2009, you received a two and a half-year prison term with a
non-parole period for intentionally causing serious injury. That involved a stabbing. The offending since then has been far less serious obviously. You obviously have serious anger management issues as this offending makes clear. You admitted as much in your police interview.
26 Undoubtedly the criminal history is relevant to my task but of course I must pass proportionate sentences here and you do not fall to be sentenced a second time for that past offending. You received those sentences and you served them. Undoubtedly though, those matters are relevant to my task and that is because I have to make judgements about your risk of reoffence and your rehabilitative prospects. I also have to make judgements about the need to deter you from future offending, as well as the need to protect the community from you. I have to also assess your moral culpability. Your counsel concedes the relevance of your past criminal history. I accept that the most serious matters within it are relatively dated.
27 I turn then to consider the other matters raised by Mr Goodfellow.
Guilty plea
28 The first of those matters is your guilty plea. I will treat it as a plea at a very early opportunity, even though there was a brief committal conducted here. That committal no doubt was important in the ultimate resolution of the matter and the decision taken by the Crown not to maintain the aggravated burglary charge. So it was entered at what I will treat as a very early stage and as a result there have been considerable savings. By pleading guilty you have taken this early responsibility for your offending.
29 As a result, the time, the cost and the effort of a full-blown committal hearing or a trial up in this court have been avoided. Witnesses have not been required to give evidence other than the victim, one other civilian and a police member, and that was at the committal and there was a politely run and non-confrontational approach taken in cross examination in the lower court. It seems plain you were always going to be pleading to something. You had made full admissions and you were cooperative with the police, and I take that into account in your favour as well.
30 You have then in these various ways facilitated the course of justice.
31 Your guilty plea is worthy of extra weight for the many reasons set out in the decision of Worboyes.[1] There has been an ever-growing backlog of cases waiting for a hearing in this court. This case is not one of them.
[1]Worboyes v The Queen [2021] VSCA 169
32 I take these various matters into account in mitigation.
Remorse
33 Your counsel pointed to your plea and what you had said in the interview and argued that there was some remorse here. I accept that submission. You were not trying to justify or excuse your conduct in the course of the police interview.
34 I take the existence of remorse into account in your favour.
Rehabilitation
35 I turn now to your prospects of rehabilitation. I have mentioned the report of Ms Cidoni. She assesses you as having a moderate to high risk for future violent offending. I am not surprised by that. I was a little bit surprised by her conclusion that drug use was a major factor in this offending. Even if true, it would not be mitigatory but I do not accept that opinion at all (see paragraph 66 of Ms Cidoni’s report). Nor was your counsel in any way relying on that opinion.
36 As to your prospects, it is a bit hard not to be guarded here given the nature of this actual offending. It was an extravagant assault to use a chainsaw on another human being; yet you did. The interview answer highlighted by your counsel in paragraph 3 is an interesting one as if to say what else was a father to do in such a setting? Surely a father might choose to learn what had actually happened and whatever the answer to that query, taking the law into your own hands with any weapon, much less a chainsaw, was just beyond the pale.
37 You obviously have relevant prior criminal history.
38 Mr Goodfellow argued that there are some encouraging factors, being opportunity for employment, a stable relationship, family support and accommodation. You had all these things and yet you offended. Lack of employment has not ever been an issue for you. Acts of violence have been. You no longer have youth on your side. You are not some silly teenager. You have pleaded guilty at a very early stage and were cooperative with the police and you do have some remorse. You also have, it would seem, some insight into having an anger management issue. These are all positives. It is obviously also positive that you do have family support and employment and a home to go to. One would hope that the time you have served to this point in prison, quite difficult time in the course of the global pandemic, and the time that lies ahead will have some role in deterring you from future offending.
39 I certainly will not write you off. Far from it actually. Having considered all of the materials over the weekend, I am prepared to find that you have quite realistic prospects of rehabilitation. You need to abstain from drug use and you need to somehow learn to deal with your anger issues.
Delay
40 I turn to the issue of delay. There is not much in the delay point at all and your counsel conceded as much. I do not ignore it but it really does not strike me as being a matter of any enormous weight here. The offending occurred in January 2021. The committal mention in April 2021 was adjourned off to July of that year to allow for resolution discussions and when they failed to bear fruit, the committal was conducted in November of last year. Very shortly after, the matter settled. The plea did not get on in the February circuit. I accept that there is a level of stress in having the matter outstanding and I do take that into account. Also that you have seemingly remained out of trouble albeit it in a custodial setting. So I do not ignore the delay submission but it really is not a matter of any great weight in my task.
COVID-19
41 I accept the submissions made by your counsel (paragraph 15) as to the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on your custodial experience.
42 It is clear that the COVID-19 virus and the response to it by those running the prisons has increased your prison burden. Prison has undoubtedly been a more stressful environment in the time that you have been there to this point and that is for a period exceeding 475 days. Social distancing has not been easy. No doubt there has been worry about catching the virus in such a setting where, unlike someone in the community, there is really no level of autonomy. There have been some lockdowns and you have also experienced the increased burden of quarantine on a number of occasions.
43 You would have had some limitations to visiting and courses in much of the period in which you have been held.
44 It has not been a good time to be locked up.
45 Things have looked up in recent times both in the community and in a prison setting. I note that personal visits resumed from about March of this year.
46 What lies ahead in the future is impossible for me to determine. I cannot speculate. Those whose job it is to run the prisons will be able to reflect on the impact of any past and ongoing limitations on a case by case basis. They will have the power to address any increased burden in your case by way of conferring emergency management days. I cannot know if that will take place or not. I do not proceed on the assumption that it will. I cannot know and to take it into account would be to contemplate 'executive action' which is prohibited.
47 I take into account the increased burden posed by the response to COVID-19 in the ways contemplated by Mr Goodfellow.
Parity
48 I turn then to the discussion that you witnessed about parity of sentence. I probably do not need to, given that your counsel abandoned the submission, but I want you to understand why he did. I am sure you do. As a general proposition, and this is very much a simplification, like offenders ought receive the same or at least very similar sentences. It is a rule that is designed to avoid a justified sense of grievance between co-offenders. All things, however, are seldom equal and they are certainly not here. I am not going to descend to any enormous detail here given the concessions made by your counsel. Your son was not 48 years old. He was 22. He did not possess a number of highly relevant violence offences in the past. He had a short history with only a couple of adult court appearances. He had not been sent to prison in the past or even detained at Youth Justice for any offence. He was not wielding a chainsaw. He was caught up in the elevated state arising from an altercation in which he was a party. He rang his father, someone who would be expected to bring to bear some mature consideration of choices. You let him and yourself down very badly. You raised the stakes incredibly by using that chainsaw in the course of a physical attack.
49 When looking at the matters personal to each of you, virtually all of them flow in your son’s favour and significantly so.
50 He was dealt with in the lower court. No doubt the Magistrate who sentenced him had to make assessments as to Jacob's rehabilitative prospects, his risk of reoffence and the need to give weight to protection of the community and specific deterrence. They are matters of great weight in my task and would have had a significantly reduced emphasis in your son’s case given his age, his far more modest criminal history and his role. In fact, I cannot even know what the Magistrate had regard to or even the factual basis of sentencing as I have no reasons for that sentence. It is easily possible that the intentionally causing injury charge was limited to the initial stabbing of the victim by your son. There may be no overlap of the offending at all, so all things are decidedly not equal here and you know that. You were 48 years old and with a lengthy criminal record including many appearances for serious violence offending in the past. So, although I accept that absent him from the equation, you, Mr Whitehouse, would not have been offending on this day, when I consider the position of each of you, plainly you must fare far worse than your son by way of sentence. I am explaining these things to you so you will understand why you will do worse than your son by way of sentence. I cannot stop you from having an unjustified sense of grievance, but that is what it would be. In fact, I do not think you would be of that state of mind at all. If you think about it even for a second or two, you will surely know why your son must fare better than you, and you would hope he would.
Report
51 I have mentioned the report of Ms Cidoni. I see no need to set out slabs of that report. I have been assisted by the matters covered in it. Not just the risk assessment but matters touching upon your background, the test results and the opinion section with the various diagnoses. She also has some recommendations for treatment which make good sense. I do take into account the report though your counsel was explicit in disavowing any reliance on any of the principles from the well-known case of Verdins.[2] The matters spoken of in that report are still relevant to my task and it is plain enough when I read that report over the weekend that you were deeply affected by the breakdown of your long-term relationship.
[2]R v Verdins [2007] VSCA 102; 16 VR 269; 169 A Crim R 581 (“Verdins”) at [11]
General
52 I turn to some more general matters. I am required to take into account a large range of matters including the maximum penalty and the nature and the gravity, as well as the impact of any crimes committed.
Current Sentencing Practice
53 I am required to take into account current sentencing practices. Current sentencing practices are only one factor amongst many and they are not a controlling factor. I have looked at a variety of materials. I have focussed mainly on the intentionally causing injury for obvious reasons. I have looked at the Sentencing Advisory Council Snapshot No. 240 for that crime. Also, the Sentencing Advisory Council online data for that crime.
54 I have looked also at the Judicial College of Victoria sentencing manual case collection of sentences for that crime as well (see 4.5.1 & 2).
55 The circumstances of the commission of the offence of intentionally causing injury are infinitely variable and hence sentences imposed will widely vary. There can be a very superficial injury caused by a spontaneous single blow or punch without any bladed implement right up to sizeable injuries caused by a prolonged and joint attack with weapons. ‘Injury’ can cover a multitude of different outcomes and it covers also injuries which prior to the amendments to the Crimes Act would have been classified as serious injuries. Because of those amendments, to meet the description of serious injury they must now be life threatening or involve substantial and protracted effects. It follows then that the band of ‘injury’ has been expanded and can take into account injuries of some real significance.
56 I have mentioned looking at the statistics, but they have inherent limitations. They say nothing at all about the individual features of any case. Nothing about the offender. Nothing about the crime. They are silent as to all of the many features of aggravation or mitigation which might exist in a given case and which will go some way to explain a particular sentencing outcome.
57 Other cases, even comparable ones, also have significant limitations.
58 There is no such thing as one correct sentence and another judge in any of these other cases I have looked at might permissibly have imposed a different sentence, either a higher one, or a lower one, for that matter.
59 What I must do is pass an appropriate sentence in your case.
60 That outcome is not driven by what has happened in other cases, or by what the statistics disclose as to what has most commonly been done in the past. Or by what happened to your son. I am exercising a sentencing discretion in this case, that is, your case, not his.
Purposes
61 I have to take into account the various purposes of sentencing.
62 Rehabilitation is one such purpose. I do not ignore that purpose. You have realistic prospects of rehabilitation. However, rehabilitation is not the only purpose of sentencing. It would be given more weight if you were younger and with a less significant criminal record.
63 Given the nature of this offending and your past criminal history, rehabilitation must surrender some ground to some of the other sentencing purposes here.
64 Punishment is obviously an important sentencing purpose in this case. You must be punished for your crime justly and proportionately. The gravity of the crimes are not aggravated by your having the prior criminal history that I have discussed.
65 I must also denounce your conduct. Again, that is an important purpose of sentencing for a crime as serious as the intentionally causing injury was. It was a pretty extraordinary act of violence. As mechanisms for causing injury go, this was a startling one. Your conduct must be roundly denounced. You need to get it into your head. You must not use weapons. You must not attack others with weapons.
66 Community protection is plainly an important purpose of sentencing. This was, as I say, a startling offence committed upon an unarmed man. It is almost unthinkable that one human would attack another human with such an implement but that is what you did. It is like something out of a horror movie. You took the chainsaw to the scene, you started it up and you then went on the attack. It was extraordinarily dangerous. It is true you were acting on the assumption or the understanding that this man had in some way attacked or threatened your own son but that is not a matter of any enormous mitigatory value here. I give it some weight. The fact is though you were not actually coming to his aid at the scene. He was out of the house and available to talk to you and to give an account. He was able to leave the scene. The person you believed was his antagonist was inside the house and he was inside a bathroom behind a door, a door that you used the chainsaw to cut into. It was not entirely spontaneous behaviour though plainly, until you received a report from your son, you had no intention of committing any crime on this day.
67 Specific deterrence, that is to say the need to deter you, is obviously of real importance in this case. You must be deterred from offending in the future. Courts have tried in the past to deter you with limited success. I will try again. You must get it into your head there are different ways of acting. You must pause. You must think. Do not just act, for when you do, you wind up going ‘over the top’. You wind up going to prison. To resort to an assault with a chainsaw, as I say, is both unthinkable and incredible. Yet that is what you did. This was serious offending, and a serious enough example of intentionally causing injury in my view but which happily did not end in any disastrous injuries or lasting impact.
68 Plainly, however, I must deter you.
69 I accept that being arrested and remanded in custody for as long as you have been there has had some role in deterring you. I also believe that the sentences which I will soon impose which will extend your stay in custody will also serve to deter you to a degree.
70 General deterrence relates to the need to deter other offenders in the future and that is an important sentencing purpose in this case, as is accepted to be the case by Mr Goodfellow.
71 It is clear that there are enough men who engage in violent acts and some of them with weapons. The use of a weapon raises the stakes very significantly as it did in this case.
72 I must seek to deter any likeminded offender from engaging in this style of conduct.
73 The courts have a role in deterring other people in the community who might be minded to commit this type of serious offence of violence. The message must be sent loud and clear to likeminded potential offenders that this sort of crime of violence will not be tolerated and will be met with strong punishment. People taking the law into their own hands must be discouraged. The courts have a role in suppressing that style of crime.
Gravity
74 I have to pay regard to the gravity of the offence before the court.
75 I have already mentioned some of the features which, in my view, make this a serious enough example of the offence of intentionally causing injury. Your victim was not confronting you. On the strength of a phone call from your son, you rode from one suburb to another taking with you the chainsaw as a weapon. Your victim was, as you said in the interview, hiding in a room. He was not then even confronting your son. The use of a chainsaw was quite extraordinary. The way the chainsaw was wielded, the location on his body of the wounds. The fact that there was at least some planning here. This was serious violent offending. I have scarcely mentioned the other offences. The criminal damage pales almost into insignificance. So too the cultivation. The weapons offences are also far less serious. The most serious offence by a mile is the intentionally causing injury. It is fortunate indeed for you and for your victim that he was not more seriously injured. I do accept that there was no long-term planning here and that until you received the call from your son, no crimes were being contemplated by you. The setting then is of your receiving that call and then feeling the need to act. You know how inappropriate your response was. You know you must try to curb your anger.
76 I take into account the principle of totality. The first two charges occurred in a single episode where at the very least, a high degree of concurrency would be warranted. The other offences are less serious. I have engaged in a last look at the effect of the sentences to satisfy myself that the overall effect of the sentences is commensurate with your overall criminality.
Forfeiture
77 There are a couple of ancillary orders that are sought here and there is no opposition to the making of these orders and I have signed a forfeiture orders relating to the nunchakus, the spear and the chainsaw. I am satisfied that the relevant provisions of the Confiscations Act s33 are properly invoked here and it is open for me to make an order under s33 directing that that property be forfeited to the Minister and I have signed that order.
Disposal
78 Secondly, there is a disposal order sought pursuant to s78(1) of the Confiscations Act relating to the two cannabis plants the subject of the cultivation. Again, there is no opposition to that. Again, I am satisfied that the provisions of s78 of the Confiscations Act are correctly invoked and I order the forfeiture to the State of those plants. I direct that they be handled and dealt with in the manner contemplated by the signed order that I have already pronounced, in an abbreviated form.
Sentence
79 I am sorry to have taken so long to get to this point. You need to know and want to know the nature of the sentence and that is what I will now describe to you.
80 On Charge 1, that is the charge of intentionally causing injury to James Stone, I convict and sentence you to two years nine months' imprisonment. That is the base sentence.
81 On Charge 2, which is the charge of criminal damage, I convict and sentence you to three months' imprisonment.
82 On Charge 3, which is the cultivation charge, I convict and sentence you to seven days' imprisonment.
83 On the summary offences, the two weapons offences, I believe an aggregate sentence is both open and appropriate in that case. On those two charges, you are convicted and sentenced to an aggregate term of seven days' imprisonment.
Cumulation or concurrency
84 I have ultimately taken the view that the various sentences should run concurrently with each other and upon the base obviously, which is the sentence imposed on the intentionally causing injury. So there is no order for cumulation here.
Total Effective Sentence
85 This results then in a total effective sentence of two years and nine months or 33 months' imprisonment.
Non Parole Period
86 I fix a period of 21 months during which you will not be eligible for release on parole.
Section 18 pre-sentence detention
87 You have been in custody already for a period of 480 days and you get credit for that full period and that s18 declaration is entered into the records of the court.
6AAA
88 I have taken into account your guilty plea. If you had pleaded not guilty and been found guilty of these offences by a jury, I would have sent you to prison for four and a half years. I would have fixed a non-parole period in that setting of three and a half years and that declaration made pursuant to s6AAA of the Sentencing Act is also to be entered into the records of the court.
89 Let me just see if there is anything else I need to do. Any other matters from your perspective, Mr Moore?
90 MR MOORE: No, Your Honour.
91 HIS HONOUR: From your perspective, Mr Goodfellow?
92 MR GOODFELLOW: No, Your Honour.
93 HIS HONOUR: We can probably do what we did the other day. If it assists you we can put you off, you can be hosting the meeting and you can confer with your client in a private setting if you would like to do that. Would you like to or not?
94 MR GOODFELLOW: Yes, thank you, Your Honour.
95 HIS HONOUR: I do not think your solicitor is online anyway so it will just be you and your client and you will be able to speak with him and discuss with him firstly what has taken place and then his rights in relation to the sentence that I have imposed and if there is a need for a further conference then, of course, you can organise that as well.
96 MR GOODFELLOW: Thank you.
97 HIS HONOUR: Each of you as I understand it have followed the structure of the sentence. It is pretty obvious that there is no cumulation, two years and nine months is the head sentence with a non-parole period of
21 months with the full declaration for that time that has been served to this point already.98 Mr Whitehouse, you have heard all that and Mr Goodfellow will remain online and you will be in a conference with him alone and you can discuss with him what has taken place and your rights in relation to the sentence that I have imposed.
99 OFFENDER: Thank you, Your Honour.
100 HIS HONOUR: That completes the matters and I will sign the formal orders perhaps in chambers, I think. I can probably disconnect the various players then. Mr Whitehouse, I am here doing the list and there is a trial being heard later in the week and that is all the prosecutor is wanting to talk to me about. It has no connection to your case at all, so what I will do is I will have you off in that room essentially with Mr Goodfellow and your daughter will be disconnected from the meeting as well and I will then have this discussion on this unrelated matter with Mr Moore. Thank you.
101 MR GOODFELLOW: If Your Honour pleases.
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