R v Grover
[2020] VCC 1988
•9 December 2020
| IN THE COUNTY COURT OF VICTORIA | Revised Not Restricted Suitable for Publication |
AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL JURISDICTIONCR 20-00941
| THE QUEEN |
| v |
| CAMERON GROVER |
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| JUDGE: | HER HONOUR JUDGE HAMPEL |
| WHERE HELD: | Melbourne |
| DATE OF HEARING: | 9 December 2020 |
| DATE OF SENTENCE: | 9 December 2020 |
| CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | R v Grover |
| MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2020] VCC 1988 |
REASONS FOR SENTENCE
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APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the Director of Public Prosecutions | Mr R. Pirrie | Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions |
| For the Accused | Mr N. Howard | Victoria Legal Aid |
HER HONOUR:
1 Cameron Grover, you have pleaded guilty to one charge of using a carriage service to procure a person under 16 years of age, one of possess cannabis, and one of possess a prohibited weapon.
2 Between 9 March and 22 April this year, using an app called Kik, you initiated sexualised conversation with and continued then to engage in sexualised communication with a person you believed to be a 14-year-old girl.
3 It started by you sending her a photograph of yourself holding your erect penis and asking her if she wanted to meet you and suck it. She told you in that first exchange that she was 14. Undeterred by that, you continued to communicate with her and falsely told her you were 16, when in fact you were 24. She challenged you about your age, indicating that you looked older than 16 in the photograph that you had attached to your profile. You denied that you were older and maintained the deception that you were 16 throughout the period of offending.
4 Over that six weeks or so, you repeatedly invited her to come to your house, to meet you and told her, in graphic detail, of the sexual activities you wanted to engage in with her and for her to engage in with you. She responded to your importuning, telling you that she was only 14, that she had never had “a boyfriend or anything”, which seems to suggest she was also saying she had had no sexual experience. You boasted about your sexual prowess and the compliments that you have received from other girls in sexual activity with them. You urged her to skip school and come to your house for sex. She told you at one stage that she would not feel comfortable coming straight to your house, because she did not know you, and you then suggested alternative meeting places. Throughout this you continued importuning her to meet you and to send her sexualised messages and photographs of your erect penis and even, on one occasion, a video of you masturbating.
5 She eventually agreed to meet you, not at your home, but somewhere public, at a McDonalds near your house. She did not arrive but you were observed at the McDonalds at the appointed time. You messaged her later that day again importuning her to meet you at your home sometime over the next few weeks.
6 That was the last communication between the two of you and you were arrested a week after that.
7 You were arrested because the 14-year-old girl who you thought you were communicating with was in fact an undercover police officer from the Joint Anti Child Exploitation Team.
8 When arrested, you made full admissions to using Kik for contacting underage girls for sexual matters. You identified the 14 year old who was in fact the undercover police officer as one person you had been talking to who was underage. You said to the police when interviewed that you thought she was 14. You acknowledged that you had been talking to her for a few months, that you had sent her images of yourself and had made arrangements to attend, and had later attended at, a McDonalds to meet her. When asked whether you intended to have sex with her you said 'I think so but I wasn't – I wasn't like – I was doing something silly that I should not ever do'.
9 When your house was searched following your arrest, some cannabis and what is called a conducted energy device (CED), that is, a type of stun gun, were found on your bedside table. You acknowledged that the cannabis was yours and told police it was the remains of a recent purchase of 14 grams for $140. You said you had purchased the CED as a joke, that you had no intention of using it and professed surprise that it had been delivered. This indicates you knew it was a prohibited weapon.
10 It is these circumstances that give rise to three charges to which you have pleaded guilty and for which you now come to be sentenced.
11 The first charge is the most serious. That is so not only objectively by the circumstances but also by the maximum penalty imposed by Parliament, namely 15 years' imprisonment. Possession of that quantity of cannabis for your personal use carries a maximum term of imprisonment of 12 months or a fine. And possession of the CED is punishable by a maximum of two years' imprisonment or a fine.
12 Offences involving sexual exploitation of children, such as this, are rightly regarded both by Parliament and the courts as serious.
13 In his helpful submissions, Mr Pirrie for the Commonwealth noted what had been said by our Court of Appeal in DPP (Cth) v Watson.[1] The Court of Appeal made the following observations:
The respondent's offending shows that the internet may be used as a highly effective medium through which to exploit and sexualise vulnerable children who are now able to have unsupervised access to the internet. Computers and mobile phones with internet access afford the willing offender with unparalleled world-wide opportunity to exploit the young and impressionable. It is a form of offending that is difficult to detect'
[1]DPP (Cth) and DPP v Watson [2016] VSCA 73; 259 A Crim R 327, at [19].
14 The features of your offending that are relevant to the assessment of its seriousness in the scale of offences of this type include its duration (44 days from the first to the last day, although there was not contact every single day), the considerable number of communications over that time and the explicit nature of the sexual discussions that you engaged in with the person you believed to be a 14-year-old girl. Therefore, this was not isolated or a spontaneous offence. You had many opportunities over that time to appreciate how wrong your conduct was and to desist. But instead you persisted and escalated your attempt to meet her.
15 You lied about your age, presenting yourself as a 16-year-old schoolboy, someone of like age to her, and you maintained that lie even after she challenged you about your age because of your appearance in the photograph. Despite what you were told by the undercover police officer posing as the child about her sexual inexperience, you persisted in the graphic sexualised communications that you sent her, both verbally and visually. And when she resisted and continued to resist your attempt to meet you and expressed her concerns about meeting you in your house because she did not know you, you continued to persist and then started suggesting alternative venues.
16 When she did eventually agree to meet you, you went to the nominated venue, and waited for her. This showed that you were intending to make good on what you had said you had wanted to do, which was to meet her and to engage in sex with her. It was persistent and escalating behaviour. And, as you told police, it was your intention to have sex with her if you could or, maybe better put, your hope that sex would eventuate.
17 The persistence, the nature of the communications, the deceptions, the importuning and the escalating in an attempt at a face-to-face meeting with sexual activity as part of the hoped-for outcome all make this a serious example of this type of offence.
18 It is clear therefore that, subject to considerations personal to you, general deterrence is the primary sentencing consideration. That is so because of the paramount public interest in promoting the protection of children from sexual exploitation by adults. Grooming offences such as these are becoming increasingly prevalent through apps such as Kik. Social media and messaging platforms allow predators to use the internet anonymously and further their engagement in conduct that was described in the explanatory memorandum introducing this as an offence as “abhorrent practices”.
19 It has long been accepted that cyber grooming offences also carry with them the implicit presumption of harm which also attaches to contact offences. It is for that reason that the law seeks to protect children from immature decisions in relation to engaging in sexualised behaviour and therefore why people who use apps such as Kik to encourage children to engage in inappropriate sexual behaviour should understand that, when detected, their behaviour will be denounced and punished accordingly.
20 What then, are the matters relied on and the personal circumstances or matters relevant to your circumstances to weigh against the significance of general deterrence.
21 You are relatively young. You were 24 at the time of the offending and you are now 25. You have no previous criminal history of any kind. You have not been charged or convicted of anything since.
22 When arrested, you immediately made extensive admissions to the police and, consistently with that, you pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity. Those matters are clearly relevant to your acceptance of responsibility and entitle you, for that reason and for reasons relating to the advancement of the interests of justice and its utilitarian value, a significant reduction in sentence. So too does the continued threat of COVID-19 in our community. In the course of plea submissions with Mr Howard, I detailed the matters that I considered were relevant to COVID-19 and sentencing today.
23 Whilst there has been some start or some return to a plan for face-to-face visits from family members and for face-to-face contact for educational and other programs in prisons, there is still a significant reduction in activities and opportunities and visits compared to those that existed before COVID-19 came to these shores. That means there is a reduction in courses that are available, significant restrictions on movement within the prison system, mandatory quarantine if anybody is transferred from one prison to another or is admitted to prison in the first place and likely to be more limited times to mingle with other prisoners and to be out of cells. There is also, of course, the ever-present fear, much greater in a closed community such as a prison, that if COVID-19 does find its way in, that there is less opportunity to protect yourself, a greater fear of contracting it, and the inability to take the steps to protect yourself that you might take were you at liberty, all add to the burden of imprisonment. That is also significant in terms of assessing the value to be given to the plea of guilty in these COVID-19 times. I take all of those matters into account.
24 In the course of his plea submissions, Mr Howard conceded that, whilst for offences of this type and as the authorities provided by the prosecution indicated, imprisonment was usually inevitable. He initially submitted that your circumstances warranted release on a community correction order with a justice plan attached to it. When the Commonwealth pointed out that a justice plan could not attach to a Commonwealth community correction order,
Mr Howard submitted that you should be released upon a recognisance release order with a justice plan attached to it, a sentencing option which is available for commonwealth offences.
25 To be eligible for a justice plan a person must have a recognised intellectual disability and have been accepted as being eligible for disability services from DHHS. Now, of course, a person would also be eligible for services through the NDIS. On the evidence and submissions submitted, in advance of the plea, it was not clear to me that you were a person with a diagnosed intellectual disability, a client of DHHS or in receipt of support through the NDIS. I gave your legal advisors the opportunity to provide such evidence if it existed. None was forthcoming.
26 On the hearing of the plea today, Mr Howard told me that you are not registered with DHHS as an intellectual disability client nor have you been registered with or applied for services through the NDIS. The evidence now presented on the plea, including the additional evidence provided as a supplement to the report of Ms Carla Lechner, does not in my view raise a realistic possibility of your having or being diagnosed with an intellectual disability which would justify an adjournment for a further enquiry.
27 This came up in a somewhat unusual way. In the material originally filed for the purposes of a plea, a report from Ms Rankcom on behalf of Yarra Valley Psychology, prepared by her in June 2016, indicated that your IQ, assessed on the Wechsler adult intelligence scale fourth addition test fell within the range of 68 to 76, which gave you a percentile rank of three. Ms Rankcom said, based on this information alone, that score range placed you between the two diagnostic categories of borderline intellectual functioning and intellectual disability of mild severity.
28 She noted a disparity in your test results. You performed poorly on processing speed and perceptual reasoning subtests. However, she noted your performance on the verbal comprehension and working memory subtests was better. However, your performance on each of the four subtests was poor, which she concluded was consistent with a diagnosis of borderline intellectual functioning or intellectual disability, mild severity.
29 It is significant to note that, in 2016, there was not a formal diagnosis of intellectual disability, mild severity, but a finding that IQ test results were “consistent with” a diagnosis either of borderline intellectual functioning or intellectual disability of mild severity.
30 She nonetheless concluded that you met the diagnostic criteria for intellectual disability, mild severity. That was because she relied, not only on your IQ score, but also because of her view there were deficits in your adaptive functioning. In particular, she relied on reports from Cassandra, the mother of a friend with whom you were staying after moving out of your mother’s home. Cassandra assisted you to be assessed by Ms Rankcom.
31 Cassandra reported you were underweight and malnourished when you came to live at her home, that you were unable to complete household chores, such as cooking, without direction and supervision, that you were unable to manage your money and budget for expenses without assistance and that she was afraid to leave you alone for periods of more than two hours because of her concern that you made poor decisions, would make poor decisions or may not know how to respond in an emergency.
32 Ms Ranckom concluded, on the basis of that information, that you were unlikely to be employed in the mainstream workforce and that you would need support to be able to find appropriate supported employment and to learn skills of daily living. Based on that, it would appear that you became eligible for a disability support pension and, on Ms Rankcom’s recommendation, Cassandra became eligible for carer support payments for you.
33 Ms Rankcom also noted at the time that she assessed you that you initially presented with symptoms of depression and anxiety, which improved over the time that she saw you.
34 Four years later, in September 2020, you were assessed by Ms Carla Lechner, clinical and forensic psychologist for the purposes of this plea. She assessed you as being socially immature with few social skills. However, by then, you were able to give a much more comprehensive account of your childhood and upbringing than you had been able to give at the time that you saw Ms Rankcom.
35 You told her that you had had what appeared to be a relatively unremarkable schooling, although you said you had had the assistance of an integration aid because you had had problems with learning and you had also been engaged in speech therapy throughout primary school. You told Ms Lechner that you generally enjoyed school and did not have any social or behavioural problems there.
36 You told Ms Lechner that you had moved out of home due to problems in your relationship with one of your siblings and that you had lived with a ‘mate’ in Mount Evelyn for about two years. The mate would appear to be your friend whose mother Cassandra took you to the psychologist, Ms Rankcom, and who became your carer. You told Ms Lechner that it was during the time that you were living in Mount Evelyn that you received psychological assistance for depression and anxiety and that it was at that time that you were diagnosed with a mild intellectual disability and placed on the disability support pension.
37 However, after that, you were employed for, it would appear, about a year at a nursery in Mount Evelyn and left that employment only because you moved back to live with your mother. It was mainstream, not supported employment. Ms Lechner noted limitations in her assessment of you. It was via telephone because you were not able to access an audio-visual medium. You were nervous initially but relaxed as time progressed.
38 She administered some tests but not the full IQ test that was administered back in 2016 by Ms Rankcom. She noted that her assessment of your verbal skills suggested that your level of functioning was in the low-average range and your conceptual thinking skills in the average range. She said in her initial report that, in the absence of seeing the previous testing results, it was difficult to comment on the apparent differences, save to say that there are other indexes that contribute to an overall intelligence quotient. She noted you were very much lacking in confidence.
39 Ms Lechner administered the Wechsler abbreviated scale of intelligence (second edition) test to estimate your verbal and cognitive functioning. She concluded, as a result of that, that your performance placed you in the low-average range of verbal intelligence, but that you demonstrated a good capacity for conceptual thinking. She said:
Hence he is able to interpret the world around him in an objective manner, to take perspectives other than his own and to see the bigger picture. His comprehension and expressive skills were not as well developed, hence Mr Grover may impress as more cognitively dull than he is. He also lacks confidence in his verbal skills, hence may not speak his mind for fear of being wrong.
40 She noted that you presented with symptoms of cannabis use disorder which, based on your self-report you have not smoked for some time, was in early remission, as well as adjustment disorder with mixed depression and anxiety and features of autism spectrum disorder. So far as the mixed depression and anxiety, that was based on two spot tests, which assess your presentation in the 10 days or two weeks before the administration of the test, which is why there is obviously a very guarded identification of symptoms, rather than a diagnosis of suffering from those conditions.
41 So far as the autism spectrum disorder features, Ms Lechner was careful to say that that needed further assessment to firm up on a diagnosis. She also noted your report of a previous diagnosis of mild intellectual disability but was sceptical about whether that was likely to be a correct diagnosis.
42 Ms Lechner also consulted your mother who advised that you achieved your developmental milestones within normal limits, that you had some learning problems at school, that it was Centrelink who had arranged the assessment to facilitate your approval for receiving the disability support pension and there was no formal diagnosis of any disability until after you had left school.
43 When I raised my concerns about whether there was evidence of an intellectual disability, Mr Howard asked for a further report or consideration from Ms Lechner and she was then provided with Ms Rankcom's report. In the helpful addendum dated 5 December, Ms Lechner said:
The testing results of Ms Ranckom indicate performances that are variable across domains of verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory and processing speed, with Mr Grover's verbal comprehension index falling into the borderline low-average range and representing a relative strength….
I further note that the testing in 2016 was conducted at a time when
Mr Grover was depressed in mood, had just moved out of home and was feeling at a particularly low ebb, this possibly contributing to a lower score than that achieved this year. I am not able to comment if Mr Grover would have similarly improved in other domains and whether or not he would still fall into the mildly intellectually disabled range.
Given that his deficits do not appear to be global in nature, it is more likely that he has cognitive strengths and deficits rather than an intellectual disability per se. Having said that, his intellectual level of functioning is, at best, still below the average range.
44 On enquiry then from Mr Howard, it would appear that the other concerns, or the other matters that have been relied on by Ms Ranckom, your difficulty in completing activities of daily life without assistance and support, have also disappeared. You are able now to live independently, to cook, to do household tasks and to manage your money. And so the social or psycho-social matters that had been relied upon by Ms Ranckom do not apparently weigh into the mix anymore.
45 It is for those reasons that I consider that the evidence now provided to me does not raise a realistic possibility of an intellectual disability justifying further enquiry.
46 Dealing then with your personal circumstances. As I have noted, you are now 25. You have no history of prior offending. According to Ms Lechner, you present as a socially and emotionally immature young man with few social skills and with a history, from 2016, of depression and anxiety.
47 In addition, you were the subject of an assault or an armed robbery at a bus stop, as I understand it, at knife point in 2017 or 2018, and you have recounted some post-trauma symptoms arising out of that. Ms Lechner also noted that you have some features of what might be autism spectrum disorder.
48 You were brought up initially by both parents but then, from the age of five, by your mother alone after your parents separated. At some stage during your teens, you stopped seeing your father. Whether he lost interest or you felt rejected by him is a little unclear on the materials but it seems you have been without a significant father figure in your life since he disappeared out of your life.
49 You have a number of sibling and step-siblings, some of whom you have had poor relationships with, some of whom you have or now have better relationships with. Significantly, whatever the disruption in 2016 was when you moved out of home, it would appear that, from 2018, you have been back living with your mother in what appears to be a loving and supportive relationship. You also have a good relationship with one of your older sisters. That means you now have good family support.
50 You have a relatively poor employment history. You have had that 12 months of employment after you were diagnosed with an intellectual disability which somewhat belies the grim prognosis Ms Ranckom was expressing at the time. In more recent times, you have been, not only going to gym, partly, as I understand it, as a result of starting on a self-defence course after you were held up, partly for your general wellbeing. You are now undertaking a personal trainer course, at Certificate III and IV level. I am told you are hopeful of obtaining employment in that field. Things are therefore looking more positive for you in terms of your desire to engage in work and your desire to be seen, not as a person with an intellectual disability, but as a person without a disability and as someone who can engage in meaningful employment. So, they are all positive factors counting in your favour despite a pretty unimpressive education and employment history up to the age of 25.
51 So, those matters are positive features I take into account in looking at your prospects for rehabilitation more generally. So far as your risk of reoffending in a like manner, it is hard to assess that. Ms Lechner assess that your risk of reoffending in a like manner is low to moderate. The difficulty in the assessment is that, when she was taking you through the offending itself, she noted that, on asking you to explain why the behaviour was wrong, she said that your narrative sounded slightly parrot-like and it was difficult to ascertain if that was your internalised view.
52 You told her you were not interested in kids and she noted that you were uncomfortable in discussing your sexual history. You denied engaging in voyeurism, frottage or exhibitionism and whilst you had been a user of adult pornography, denied any interest in child pornography. Ms Lechner noted that there is no specific measure to provide an actuarial or dynamically-based protocol for assessing risk of recidivism for non-contact sex offending. She noted, on what limited research there was to date, that you would fulfil some of the criteria that had been identified as relevant to risk of recidivism but not others. In particular that you lack confidence in your interpersonal competence, you experience periods of depression and anxiety and you have abused cannabis in the past. They have been identified as markers of increased risk.
53 Having noted that you do not demonstrate symptoms of psychopathy or evidence of criminal history she cautioned:
Whilst ostensibly he does not exhibit symptoms of sexual deviance, his willingness to meet an underage girl needs further exploration. This is most likely due to psychosocial immaturity but may reflect a genuine sexual interest in younger bodies.
54 It is on the basis of those factors that she concluded your risk of re-engaging in such behaviour was low to moderate, noting that the level of risk only moves into the moderate range if, indeed, you have a preference for younger bodies. If that is absent, the risk is low. She notes that the process of apprehension, police interview and court attendance have been salutary and are likely to have a deterrent effect on you.
55 It seems to me that, in those circumstances, given your reluctance to discuss sexual matters with Ms Lechner and her concern about what might have been a parroting of an explanation for why the offending was wrong, that it is absolutely essential that you engage in a proper, structured sex offender treatment program and I urge those who are going to be responsible for your care and supervision to assess you for eligibility and to have you placed in such a program tailored to your needs as soon as possible.
56 Once the written submissions of Mr Howard, based on intellectual disability and a justice plan, were abandoned, Mr Howard put that, nonetheless, you were a person who should be treated as falling outside the generally accepted sentencing outcome, for offences of this sort, namely imprisonment, by reason of the mitigating factors already referred to and by reason of your particular vulnerability, were you to be sentenced to a term of imprisonment.
57 I accept that, having regard to your youth or age - you are just 25 - the descriptions of you as psychosocially immature, your relatively small size, your lack of confidence and the fact that you have not previously been in the criminal justice system or sentenced to a term of imprisonment, you are more vulnerable than some others in the prison system.
58 I do not, however, consider that those vulnerabilities are of such a degree that they alone, or in combination with other matters relied on, would justify removing you from the category of offenders for this type of offence for whom imprisonment is warranted. Nor, if it were a borderline case, would it tip the balance in favour of a non-custodial sentence.
59 What I do consider though is that all those matters, including your vulnerability and, for the reasons I have outlined and those outlined by Ms Lechner, both in her original report and in her addendum report, operate to reduce the sentence that otherwise might have been appropriate. However, I am of the view that general deterrence is, indeed, in this case, the paramount sentencing factor and that, notwithstanding the mitigatory factors that are relied on, and that I have said I accept, no sentence other than one involving a component of imprisonment immediately served is appropriate to deal with it.
60 Therefore, I propose to, on that first charge, sentence you to a term of imprisonment and direct your release upon a recognisance release order after serving a part of that term of imprisonment and directing that you then be released for the balance of that term on your promise or undertaking to be of good behaviour and on the condition that you participate in a sex offender treatment program if directed to do so.
61 It is my hope and expectation that that will start whilst you are in custody and continue through a sex offender treatment program whilst you are under the control of a recognisance release order. I am also required to direct that you be placed on the sex offender register for a period of eight years because Charge 1 is a single Class 2 offence and it is mandatory that you be placed on the register for that period of eight years.
62 I am required to tell you about the sex offender registration, that it is a mandatory period of eight years and I am required to provide you with a copy of the conditions of that. Given the COVID restrictions that apply in this court, I am going to dispense with the requirement that you sign a document or request that you sign a document acknowledging that you have been provided with it. A copy will be given to Mr Howard and will be provided to Corrections to be handed to you. But you must understand that you are now to be on that register and subject to its conditions for the period of eight years. That is mandatory, I have no discretion in relation to that.
63 So far as the other two charges are concerned, they are not serious. The cannabis was clearly for your own use and whatever stupidity motivated you to obtain that weapon, it was on your bedside table and there is no evidence that it was used or had been used. Both offences are therefore properly punishable by a fine rather than a term of imprisonment. But that means you will also have financial penalties imposed on you and you are going to have to speak to Mr Howard and work out how to deal with that.
64 Before I formally pass sentence, Mr Grover, I am going to read to you the terms of the recognisance release order and ask you whether you understand it, because you need to consent to it if you do understand it and wish to be bound by it.
65 I am going to order that you be sentenced to a term of imprisonment and, after a certain period, be released upon giving your promise to be of good behaviour for the balance of the term, that you be under the supervision of the Deputy Commissioner of Community Correctional Services or Sex Offender Management or their nominee for the balance of the term, that you are to attend for treatment for sex offender programs or programs to reduce reoffending as directed by the Deputy Commissioner, Community Correctional Services and Sex Offender Management or their nominee and that you report to the Cranbourne Community Corrections Centre at 176 Sladen Street, Cranbourne by 4.00pm within two days of your release from custody.
66 Now, the purpose of this order is to fix the term of imprisonment that you serve and the time at which you must be released, so you do not have to apply for parole. The time that you are released is pre-determined by me. After that, you are released into the community on your promise to be of good behaviour for what is, in effect, the balance of the sentence.
67 If you are of good behaviour, then that is fine. If you are not of good behaviour, either by committing any other offence or by failing to comply with the conditions of this order, including engagement in a sex offender treatment program, that is a breach of the good behaviour condition and you will be brought up before me to be dealt with, do you understand that?
68 OFFENDER: Yes, I do, your Honour.
69 HER HONOUR: All right. And, so, if you fail without reasonable excuse to comply with the order, I can discharge it and deal with you by re-sentencing, do you understand that?
70 OFFENDER: Yes, your Honour.
71 HER HONOUR: And are you prepared to be bound in accordance with the order?
72 OFFENDER: Yes, your Honour.
73 HER HONOUR: All right, could you now please stand, Mr Grover.
74 On all three charges to which you have pleaded guilty, the two indictable charges and the related summary offence, you are convicted.
75 On Charge 1 of use a carriage service to procure a person believed to be under the age of 16, contrary to s 474.26(1) of the Criminal Code, you are sentenced to be imprisoned for a period of two years. I order your release under paragraph 20(1)(b) of the Crimes Act1914 (Cth), after serving 12 months of the term of imprisonment, upon your giving security by recognisance of $1,000 to comply with the following conditions:
· that you be of good behaviour for 12 months;
· that you be under the supervision of the Deputy Commissioner, Community Correctional Services and Sex Offender Management or their nominee for 12 months; and
· that you attend for treatment for sex offender programs or programs to reduce reoffending as directed by the Deputy Commissioner, Community Correctional Services and Sex Offender Management or his or her nominee and that you report to Cranbourne Community Corrections Centre, 176 Sladen Street, Cranbourne by 4.00pm within two days of your release from custody.
76 I have issued this order because you have been charged with the federal offence of use a carriage service to procure a person believed to be under 16, contrary to s 474.26(1) of the Criminal Code. I have sentenced you to a term of two years' imprisonment and I have decided that you be released after serving 12 months if you comply with the conditions of the order. Do you acknowledge, Mr Grover, that you have had the purpose and effect of this order explained to you?
77 OFFENDER: Yes, your Honour.
78 HER HONOUR: The consequences that may follow if you fail without reasonable excuse to comply with the conditions of the order?
79 OFFENDER: Yes, your Honour.
80 HER HONOUR: And that the order may be discharged or varied under s 20AA of the Crimes Act.
81 OFFENDER: Yes, your Honour.
82 HER HONOUR: And you agree that you are bound in accordance with the order.
83 OFFENDER: Yes, your Honour.
84 HER HONOUR: Thank you. On Charge 2, possession of cannabis, you are fined an amount of $500 and on the related summary offence of possession of the weapon, you are fined an amount of $1,000, That amounts to total fines of $1,500.
85 Under the Sex Offender Registration Act 2004 (Vic), the mandatory reporting period is eight years and a copy of those conditions will be provided to you.
86 And I declare pursuant to s 6AAA of the Sentencing Act that but for your pleas of guilty, I would have sentenced you to a sentence of three years' imprisonment with an 18-month non-parole period on Charge 1 and fines of $2,500 on the other two charges.
87 I make the forfeiture order sought.
88 Any further orders required to be made?
89 MR HOWARD: No, your Honour.
90 MR PIRRIE: No, your Honour.
91 HER HONOUR: And I note that I have dispensed with the requirement to sign both the receipt for the sex offender registration conditions and the recognisance release order. The copies of those will be provided to
Mr Howard and through him will be provided to you.
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