R v Belete

[2007] VSC 296

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF VICTORIA Not Restricted

AT MELBOURNE

CRIMINAL DIVISION

No. 1437 of 2007

THE QUEEN

v

WONDIMU BELETE

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JUDGE:	HARPER J
WHERE HELD:	MELBOURNE
DATE OFSENTENCE:	21 AUGUST 2007
DATES OF HEARING:	30-31 JULY, 1 AUGUST 2007;  3 AUGUST 2007 (PLEA)
CASE MAY BE CITED AS:	R v BELETE
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION:	[2007] VSC 296

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CRIMINAL LAW – Sentence – Attempted murder – Husband stabbed wife following access visit for children – No prior convictions – Plea of guilty during trial – Eleven years’ imprisonment – Minimum of eight years. 

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APPEARANCES:	Counsel	Solicitors
For the Director of Public Prosecutions	Mr J. Champion SC	Angela Cannon, Solicitor for Public Prosecutions
For the Accused	Mr P. Chadwick	C. Marshall & Associates

HIS HONOUR:

1. Wondimu Belete, you have pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of your wife.  It is now my duty to decide upon the appropriate punishment.  In doing so, I am of course bound by the law.  This sets out the purposes for which a sentence may be imposed.  Those purposes are limited.  One of them is to punish the offender.  Another is to deter him or others from committing the same or a similar offence in the future.  The third is to establish the conditions likely to assist with the rehabilitation of the offender.  The fourth is to make it plain, if the offence was especially serious, that the court regards with abhorrence the conduct in which the offender engaged.  The fifth is to protect the community from the offender.  Finally, the court may adopt a combination of these purposes.

1. I have considered all five of these purposes, both individually and in combination.  I will refer to the relevant facts giving rise to your attempt to kill your wife and then briefly mention each purpose in turn before considering some in more detail.

1. You and your wife separated in April 2006.  Arrangements were made for you to have access to your two young children.  On 10 November last year, you met your wife at the Flemington Police Station so that the children could spend some access time with you.  You later returned to the Police Station, with the children, and handed them to your wife.  She commenced to walk with them towards her place of residence.  She had not travelled far before you approached her with a knife hidden in a hat.  The knife had recently been sharpened, although I do not find that it was sharpened for the purpose for which you then used it.  When you reached your wife, you attacked her in a frenzy, causing her dreadful injuries.

1. In the circumstance of your attack upon your wife, punishment must be an important consideration.  This was a vicious assault with a vicious instrument.  Great suffering resulted.  Punishment must therefore play a significant part in my consideration of the appropriate penalty.

1. Deterrence is also a very real factor for consideration.  Women are often at risk of violence from their husbands or domestic partners.  A community should be judged, in part at least, by the protection it gives to its more vulnerable members.  No woman should be in fear of an attack of the kind you perpetrated on your wife, let alone actually be the victim of such an attack.  It is therefore necessary that I impose a sentence that will deter others from doing, indeed even thinking of doing, what you have done.  For this reason, general deterrence is a very important consideration in your case.

1. On the other hand, I doubt that you will ever again attempt to murder anyone.  Your record contains no conviction for any offence, let alone an offence involving violence.  Your wife gave evidence of acts of violence done by you to her.  When these accusations were put to you by the police, you denied them.  I thought that your wife was a credible witness.  As against that, her cross-examination had not finished when you changed your plea from not guilty to guilty of the charge of attempted murder.  Had cross examination concluded, her credibility may have been dented.  In these circumstances I cannot be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that her allegations are true.  Even if they are, I think that it is highly unlikely that, having served a sentence of imprisonment, you will offend again in the way that you did on 10 November last year – or, indeed, at all.  If I am correct about this, then specific deterrence is not a consideration of significance in this case.  In other words, the sentence need not include a specific and significant element designed to ensure that you do not repeat the criminal violence that brings you before me now.

1. The possibility of your rehabilitation is necessarily to be taken into account.  I think that this prospect is encouraging.  Since entering the prison system, you have participated in educational and training programs – as you did after arriving in Australia, when you made commendable efforts to improve your education and your skills generally.  You have maintained a connection with your church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Melbourne, with which you were before November 2006 actively involved.  You were also an active member of the Ethiopian Community Association in Victoria.  You were not merely a fund raiser, but also assisted in the important task of resettling new arrivals from your part of the African continent.  Work of this kind is of great benefit not only to your own Ethiopian community, but to Australian society as a whole.  I am encouraged by the prospect of your contribution continuing following your release.

1. I must next consider the necessity of expressing the court’s abhorrence of any act of violence.  Each such act, while of itself to be condemned, must be seen in its context.   In your case, that context is notably distressing.  You had just returned your children to their mother after you had enjoyed a period of access to them.  She was in your vicinity for your benefit and, I am prepared to think, for the benefit of your children too.  Yet you took advantage of her proximity to ruin her life, and perhaps as well those of the children you shared with her.  What you did to her was not merely disgraceful.  It was utterly lacking in any possible justification.  Even if she had been sleeping with another man, something she denies, still your attack on her lacks any shred of excuse.

1. The remaining specific purpose for which sentences may be imposed is the protection of the community from the offender.  I have already said that I think that there is little  chance, once you have served your sentence, of your re-offending in the future in the way you did last year.  In the meantime, the sentence I impose is designed to protect the community for at least as long as is necessary to ensure that any tendency you might have to irrational outbursts of uncontrollable violence is extinguished before your release.  That you are prone to such outbursts is proved by your unprovoked attack upon your wife.  That you are also capable of behaving decently and constructively is proved by your involvement in the church and in community affairs, by the way you have conducted yourself in prison, and by your commendable attempts to improve your education.  I have come to the conclusion that by the time you leave prison, the second (and laudable) aspect of your character will dominate the second and disgraceful aspect.

1. In sentencing you, I must have regard to the maximum penalty prescribed for the offence, as well as current sentencing practises.  The maximum penalty for attempted murder is 25 years’ imprisonment.  Current sentencing practises are that 12 years’ imprisonment is at the high end of the range for serious instances of the offence where the offender has no prior convictions.[1]  You have no prior convictions, and you pleaded guilty.  I accept that, given your inability to remember the incident, you had difficulty comprehending the otherwise straightforward notion that you must at the time of the attack have intended the death of your wife, because the injuries you inflicted upon her were so horrific that only someone who intended to kill could have inflicted them.  I therefore accept that your plea was delayed by your memory loss and by cultural factors – in particular, the difficulty of understanding the part that intention plays in the crime of attempted murder.  For these reasons, I give you more credit for pleading guilty than – having regard to the lateness of the plea - I otherwise would have done.

   [1]R v Kumar [2006] VSCA 182 at [60] and [65] per Eames JA, with whom Maxwell P and Coldrey AJA agreed.

1. I also accept that you are remorseful, that you find separation from your children very painful, and that life in prison is for you harder than for those who do not lack friends as you do, who have no language problems, and who do not have to live under customs very different from those familiar to you.

1. Your life has been far from easy.  You were born in a land of civil strife, not to say civil war.  These problems and the hardship they caused were compounded by drought and poverty.  You more than most of us have been at the mercy of forces beyond your control; and most of them were adverse.  To an extent, these matters reduce your culpability.

1. I do not accept the suggestion that the attack upon your wife was premeditated.  In my opinion it occurred in the heat of the moment.  Your thoughts then lacked clarity.  No premeditated attack of this kind would have been planned for a location outside a police station in broad daylight and under the gaze of passers-by, of whom there were bound to be at least a number.

1. In the end, however, it is the horrific nature of your crime that must determine where the centre lies among those factors, favourable and unfavourable, that I must take into account.  As you stood over your wife, knife in hand, you were in a position to dominate and humiliate her as well as brutally injure her.  You did all this, and in so doing caused her damage from which she will never entirely recover.  I am satisfied to the requisite standard that she suffered from multiple separate wounds.  Many were inflicted as she attempted to ward off you, her knife-wielding husband.  Major nerves and blood vessels were severed.  Your wife had wounds to the head, chest, left flank and right knee.  They were life-threatening, and would have been fatal but for prompt and expert medical intervention.  Just as you will find prison especially hard, so will your wife find it especially difficult to cope with her disabilities and responsibilities in an unfamiliar country with an unfamiliar language and few friends.  Apart from everything else, you have condemned her to loneliness and the difficulties of raising two young children as a recent arrival in a new cultural environment and with injuries that will never entirely heal.

1. The appropriate sentence is 11 years’ imprisonment.  I direct that you serve eight of those years before being eligible for parole.  I declare that 285 days have already been served under the sentence thus imposed, and direct that this declaration be entered in the records of the court.

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