R v Brooks
[2008] VSC 70
•7 March 2008
| IN THE SUPREME COURT OF VICTORIA | Not Restricted | |
AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL DIVISION
No. 1462 of 2007
| THE QUEEN |
| v |
| MATHEW BROOKS |
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JUDGE: | COGHLAN J | |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne | |
DATE OF HEARING: | 14 December 2007 | |
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 7 March 2008 | |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | R v Brooks | |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2008] VSC 70 | |
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Criminal Law – Sentence –Single stab wound to area of the upper left chest and shoulder – Prisoner found guilty of murder – Different versions of events given by the prisoner – Prisoner unable to accurately recall events – Lack of remorse and non-acceptance of responsibility for the death of the victim - Sentenced on the basis that the prisoner intended to cause at least really serious injury – Prisoner had difficult upbringing consisting of racial abuse and abuse of alcohol and drugs– Absence of major mental illness or intellectual disability - Low level intellectual functioning and depressive symptoms - Consideration of principles in R v Verdins; R v Buckley; R v Vo.
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APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the Crown | Ms S. Borg | Office of Public Prosecutions |
| For the Accused | Ms C. Hollingworth | Paul Vale Criminal Law |
HIS HONOUR:
Mathew Brooks, on 20 November 2007 you were convicted by a jury of the murder of Priscilla Chapple on 1 September 2006. I ordered a psychiatric report which was received on 12 December 2007 and a plea was conducted on your behalf on 14 December 2007.
You are now 33 years of age. You admitted 40 prior convictions from 13 Court appearances between 1993 and 2005. Your criminal history, although relatively persistent, is unremarkable. You have served a couple of relatively short terms of imprisonment. There is little history of violence. You have convictions for child stealing and assaulting a police officer.
Ms Chapple died as a result of being stabbed once to the area of the upper left chest and shoulder. The knife took a downwards trajectory, slightly to the right. It reached the heart and proved rapidly, although not instantly, fatal. At the time of the stabbing you, Ms Chapple (who was 19 years of age) and her two infant children, a daughter aged four years and a son aged ten months were living together in Ms Chapple’s house at 41 Tambo Avenue, Reservoir.
Although not raised during the trial, you have told your psychologist, Mr Davis, and the psychiatrist who carried out an examination on behalf of the Court, Dr Phillips, that your belief now is that others came to the house on that night. You told Dr Phillips the people who came to the house were “maybe her family” and that you walked into the kitchen and saw both the deceased and her brother with knives. You have not suggested that you actually saw somebody stab the deceased.
At the time of those events, you made no mention whatsoever of the presence of any third party. I am satisfied that you do not remember with any accuracy the events surrounding the death of Ms Chapple. Why that is so, I do not know. Whether it is because of your state of intoxication both at the time and after the event, or as a result of some psychological mechanism which has caused you to suppress it, has not been established. I am prepared to accept in your favour that you do not know precisely what happened. I am satisfied that your position is not borne out of a desire by you to avoid the consequences of your actions. I accept that it may well be that you cannot accept that you are the person who killed Ms Chapple. It follows that you cannot be seen as being remorseful. On the other hand, I do accept that you regret the death of Ms Chapple.
The events for which you fall to be sentenced are only too familiar to those of us who have been involved in the criminal law. You were, at the time of her death, in a relationship with Ms Chapple. That relationship had been in existence for about a year. You told the police that you were about to move into the deceased’s house in Reservoir and live there with her and her children on a semi-permanent basis. The relationship was marked by episodes of violence and verbal abuse.
The events of the night of 31 August/1 September 2006 are difficult to reconstruct. Much of what has been said about the night comes from you. Those versions are at best patchy and in many regards contradictory.
You told the police that on the evening of 31 August 2006 you, Ms Chapple and her children had been to the local shops and purchased food and alcohol.
The next door neighbour, Mr Passarelli, who was a chef, gave evidence that he returned home at 4.00 a.m. on the morning of 1 September 2006. He said that he went to bed at about 4.15 a.m. At about that time, he heard screaming and other noises, including footsteps, coming from the house next door. He heard a female voice shout, “get out” twice. He could not make out other words. Mr Passarelli said that he heard a man’s voice, but could not make out any words. He said he went to sleep about five o’clock and, although he continued to hear footsteps, the shouting had stopped shortly after the use of the words, “get out”. Those words had been spoken closer to the time he went to bed.
Mr Ricky Ford, who was the next door neighbour on the other side of Ms Chapple’s house, was woken at about 6.30 a.m. on 1 September 2006. You were banging on the front door. You were calling out “Ricky”, but you then left and went towards a neighbour further away. You came back at about 6.35 a.m. You again banged on the door. Mr Ford answered. You appeared to be very distressed. You asked for help and said “My family’s been killed, I’ve killed my family”. You were having difficulty standing up and Mr Ford noticed that you had been drinking. Mr Ford tried to assist and rang the police. You returned to the house. You rang 000 and spoke to the police, you said your family were dead and you threatened to burn yourself and the house. You said that she cut her throat and it was an accident. You also said that your girlfriend had been stabbed and you would stab yourself. You were very distressed and appeared to be affected by alcohol. A tape of that conversation was played to the jury.
The police attended and you were taken into custody while still speaking to 000. When you were at the Preston Police Station, you were spoken to by Senior Sergeant Dorman from the Homicide Squad and when he told you that you were to be charged with murder, you seemed to have little knowledge of what the police were speaking about. In any event, you were examined by Dr Buck and found to be unfit for interview because you were intoxicated. Most of the police officers who saw you at about that time were satisfied that you were intoxicated.
You were not then interviewed until 4 September 2006. There was a preliminary discussion with Detective Leading Senior Constable Leigh Smyth on the way from the custody centre to the Homicide Squad office. In that conversation you said that Ms Chapple had committed suicide by stabbing herself. You also said that she stabbed herself twice and that it was immediately after the stabbing that you went next door. That conversation was later confirmed in the following interview.
Throughout a long interview conducted by Senior Sergeant Dorman at the Homicide Squad office, you maintained that Ms Chapple had stabbed herself and had done so a number of times. You suggested that her motive for killing herself was concern about going to court as a witness and hostility to her by her family. A large portion of that interview has been lost, but there does not appear to be any material which would have changed that version of events in the last paragraph.
Before sentencing you, I have to establish the facts about the case which demonstrate the role played by you.
I am prepared to conclude on the whole of the evidence that the stabbing occurred at about 4.15 a.m. I am satisfied that there was some argument that developed between you and Ms Chapple. I am satisfied that Mr Passarelli heard the events surrounding the death of Ms Chapple. Both of you were affected by alcohol. That is a matter to which I will return later.
I accept that you had gone shopping and that you returned to the house and were watching films together. You were both drinking and had been for several hours. Some dispute developed which became a fully fledged argument. In that argument you stabbed Ms Chapple once. It was open for the jury to conclude that you intended death or really serious injury, but I am prepared to proceed on the basis that you intended to cause at least really serious injury, and that is the more likely basis on which the jury reached its verdict. I have no doubt that you regretted what you had done.
What follows from the finding that the death occurred at close to 4.15 a.m. was that you remained in the house for another two hours. During that time you continued to drink. You also poured water on the deceased and placed various knives around the house. At the time you were arrested, you were drunk. It is impossible to say how much you were affected by alcohol at the time of the murder, except to say that the jury were satisfied that you formed the appropriate intent. It had never formed any part of your defence that you were so intoxicated that you did not form the appropriate intent.
It follows from that analysis of the evidence that the events which led to the murder were brief, no longer than minutes. In that sense I find that the murder occurred in circumstances of a sudden loss of self-control. What triggered the events is unknown, and unless at some stage your recollection improves, it will never be known.
The murder brought to an end the life of a young woman who was 19 years of age. Her two young children have been left without a mother in circumstances that their future is problematical. Their natural father is unlikely to be in a position to take care of them. I was told at the plea that the children are in the care of the Department of Human Services.
Victim Impact Statements have been filed from Sidney Chapple, the father of the deceased, and his partner, Sonia Jonkers. They came from Traralgon twice a month to visit the grandchildren and they have been deeply affected by Ms Chapple’s death. I accept that Ms Chapple’s sister, Stephanie, who gave evidence in the trial, was also deeply distressed by her sister’s death.
As I have already observed, you are 33 years of age. Your prior convictions, although not minor, will have little influence on the sentence I am going to impose. It is clear that your prior convictions are largely drug and alcohol-related or otherwise related to the breakdown of various relationships. It is that background, more than the prior offending itself, which leads me to have reservations about your prospects of rehabilitation. It will be a matter for you to take what opportunities are on offer within the system. The sentence I have framed will give you the opportunity, on release, to play a positive role in the community.
Your life has not been an easy one. You were born in Bairnsdale. Your father was of Irish descent, your mother was Aboriginal. You are the youngest of three children. Your mother was deaf and developed a history of alcohol abuse. You could not readily communicate with her because you did not learn sign language until your late teen years. You have a very good relationship with your elder sister and tried to communicate with her at the time of these events.
Your father left the family when you were an infant. You and your sisters were removed from your mother’s care when you were quite young because of her problems. You formed a good relationship with your maternal grandmother, but she died when you were five. After her death, you and your sisters were cared for by various members of the extended family in the Gippsland area. You have been hurt by the absence of any true relationship with your parents.
You attended the local primary school and the local high school until Year 9. You were good at sport, but did not get on well at school. You were racially abused and found much of the school work beyond your capabilities, and were often in trouble for not doing your homework and for truancy. You have recurrent intrusive thoughts about being sexually abused at about that time but do not suffer from post traumatic stress disorder with respect to it.
A psychologist, Michael R. Davis, who examined you prior to the trial and gave evidence at your trial, found that you do not suffer from any major mental illness or intellectual disability. Mr Davis assessed your full scale IQ of 74, placing you in the fourth percentile. That means that 96% of persons in your age group would score higher than you. You are in the borderline range of intellectual functioning. All that seems to be consistent with what happened to you at school.
Although there was some debate about the appropriateness of the tests which were carried out on you for Aboriginal people, and Mr Davis made some sensible concessions in that regard, I am prepared to act on the findings. I suspect that you present in a way which masks your actual level of functioning.
After leaving school you worked under the Community Development Employment Programme and received some training in landscaping, painting and taking care of lawns. You last worked in 2003 when you worked on the Wyalla Goldfields train track.
Between 2003 and September of 2006, the time at which you went into custody, you were on a Jobstart allowance. You told Mr Davis that you found it hard to find work.
Your life has been marred by the abuse of alcohol and drugs. You commenced drinking alcohol in your early teens. You attempted rehabilitation in 2000 but did not persist. You smoked cannabis regularly up until about June 2005. You were a sometime user of amphetamine.
Your medical history, including your psychiatric history, is not particularly remarkable. You have consistently had bouts of depression, less than major depressive illness, but Dr Phillips made a diagnosis of dysthymia. Your ongoing depressive symptoms have been related to your struggle with alcohol and in times of stress. Medication for depression has been provided particularly when you have been withdrawing from alcohol.
It is possible that as a result of an attempt to hang yourself in 1998, you suffered an hypoxic brain injury, which has contributed to the level of your intellectual functioning.
You do not suffer from any personality disorder.
You are the father of five children from three different relationships. The eldest three children live with their maternal grandmother in Adelaide. The other two children live with their respective mothers.
You tried to get the custody of the three older children in 1998. That involved abstaining from alcohol, which you did for two years, but having obtained custody, you recommenced drinking and committed offences. You were sent to gaol and, although you were released on appeal and ordered to undergo rehabilitation treatment for alcohol abuse, that was largely unsuccessful. I do accept, however, that you care about your children and if things were different you would try to have a better relationship with them.
Your present depressive illness may be treated and you have expressed a willingness to undergo that treatment.
There is little which can be said which mitigates your offending. You are relatively young and if you do something about your alcohol problem, there is hope in the future. You have given two different versions of your relationship with Ms Chapple to the psychologist and psychiatrist. To Mr Davis you expressed great care for Ms Chapple. To Dr Phillips you said that she was less important to you. I find on the whole of the available evidence that you did have genuine regard for her.
It must be said that the events which occurred here were very brief, there was only one stab wound, and in one sense it was unlucky that the wound proved to be fatal. It cannot be avoided that we are dealing with the intentional killing of another. A young person who had much ahead of her and who was important to those close to her.
I have read the fourteen references which were tendered on your behalf. You are highly regarded by a large cross section of the community. I have taken what is expressed in those references into account in the sentence that I have framed.
As I have already observed, Dr Phillips has said that you have described the history of mild depressive symptoms consistent with a diagnosis of dysthymia. That condition is marked by ongoing mild depression. Dr Phillips also stated:
“Mr Brooks reports a number of periods of exacerbation of depressive symptoms occurring in the context of psychological stress which have been significantly contributed to by alcohol dependence and withdrawal. These exacerbations of depressive symptoms most likely represent adjustment disorder with depressed mood or an alcohol induced mood rather than being reflective of a true recurrent depressive disorder.”
The question which arises is how your dysthymia is to be treated which is a difficult one. It has to be treated in conjunction with your borderline intellectual functioning. The dysthymia itself is a direct product of your unfortunate life. I had had regard to the principles set out in R v Verdins [1].
[1]R v Buckley; R v Vo (2007) 16 VR 269
I have concluded, although there is little about your illness that would make you an inappropriate vehicle for general deterrence or operate to reduce your moral culpability, it will nonetheless make the serving of a long term of imprisonment harder for you. You do have some prospects of rehabilitation.
You have not shown any remorse and do not accept that you are responsible for Ms Chapple’s death. These are matters which will have to be taken into account in the sentencing process.
The fact that you had been drinking does not in any sense reduce your culpability, because you know of the difficulties drink causes you.
The principles of just punishment, specific deterrence and general deterrence each must play their part.
I have regard for the proposition that your background, upbringing, Aboriginality, intellectual capacity and ongoing depressive illness may well make the sentence I impose more onerous. That is particularly so in the context of your intellectual capacity.
You will be sentenced to be imprisoned for 17 years. I order that you serve 13 years before being eligible for parole. I declare that 553 days be reckoned as served and I direct that there be noted in the records of the Court the fact that this declaration has been made and its details.
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