R v Hill
[2004] VSC 293
•18 August 2004
| IN THE SUPREME COURT OF VICTORIA | Not Restricted | |
AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL DIVISION
No. 1483 of 2003
| THE QUEEN |
| v |
| SHANE JOHN HILL |
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JUDGE: | BONGIORNO J | |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne | |
DATE OF HEARING: | 20, 21, 27 - 30 July, 2 - 6 & 11 August 2004 | |
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 18 August 2004 | |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | R v Hill | |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2004] VSC 293 | |
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Criminal law - Sentencing - Murder - Murder by drug user of another drug user - No remorse - Prior convictions.
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APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the Crown | Mr R. Elston Crown Prosecutor | Office of Public Prosecutions |
| For the Defendant | Dr G. Lyon | Grubissa White |
HIS HONOUR:
On the afternoon of Sunday 17 February 2002 you struck your step-brother Craig Anthony Reynolds on the head with a house brick. You struck him a number of times; probably between about five and seven times. Your assault caused a compound fracture of his right occipital bone, a fracture to his left temporal bone and a fracture to the floor of his frontal bone. Despite these horrendous injuries he did not die immediately but survived until he succumbed to purulent meningitis. He died on 22 February 2002. The meningitis was a direct result of the injuries which you inflicted. Thus you murdered him.
On 6 August 2004 a jury found you guilty of that murder. In doing so, it rejected your claim that you killed him in the heat of passion induced by provocative words or acts on his part.
It is now my duty to sentence you according to law.
At the time you assaulted your step-brother you lived with him and your then girlfriend, Nicole Green, also known as Nicole Williams, in a house in Tonbridge Street, Carrum. You, Green and the deceased were all heroin users. You had come to live at Tonbridge Street from Paynesville, ostensibly to find work. However it would appear that your greater concern, whilst you lived at Tonbridge Street, was feeding your drug habit and to this end you wandered the Melbourne suburbs looking for your next “hit”. When you were interviewed by the police you told them that your habit at the relevant time was costing about $200 per day. There is no evidence before the Court as to where you obtained the money to support your habit although it could be safely assumed that you had no legal source of income which would yield $200 per day. But that is not relevant to my current sentencing task.
You told the police that you “scored” heroin through your step brother. You said you would just hand him the money and he would go and get it. However, it is in the nature of the sub-culture in which you moved that trust between people is minimal or non-existent. You believed your step-brother was defrauding you in your heroin dealings with him. You were quite possibly correct in that belief. This was one aspect of his allegedly provocative behaviour upon which you sought to rely in your unsuccessful attempt to avoid the conviction for which you are about to be sentenced.
The relationship between you and Reynolds in the days immediately before your attack upon him appears to have been somewhat hostile, partly as a result of the matter to which I have referred and partly because, as you put it to the police, he “hit on” your girlfriend by which you meant that he sought sexual favours from her. However it is difficult to determine with any degree of precision what the actual circumstances were immediately prior to and at the time of your attack on him. Undoubtedly tension was high: there was evidence before the Court on your trial to this effect. There was a trivial dispute over the use by your girlfriend of excessive amounts of fabric softener when she was washing clothes and it is probable that there was some dispute between you and Reynolds over drugs. He had some and you didn’t. On the other hand you told the police that immediately before you struck him you had made him a cup of coffee and earlier that morning you had gone, with your girlfriend Nicky Williams, to the Chelsea police station where you handed the watch house keeper a stainless steel meat cleaver, telling him as you did so that you were fearful of its being in the house lest you or your step-brother use it in a murderous manner. Whatever the precipitating factor, sometime on that Sunday afternoon you launched the brutal attack upon him which lead to his death. I cannot determine to the requisite standard that this attack was in any sense premeditated. Accordingly your sentence has been fixed on the basis that your murderous intent was embraced only immediately before you struck the fatal blows.
Immediately after the assault you had the presence of mind to wash the brick with which you attacked your step brother because, as you told the police, you thought your fingerprints might be on it. You thought Reynolds was dead. After you changed your clothes so that you could dispose of those you were wearing at the time of the assault, you and Williams left the house. The two of you wandered the streets until you returned to Tonbridge Street at about 9.00 pm in a taxi, in a futile attempt to construct a partial alibi for yourself with respect to Reynolds’ injuries by “discovering” Reynolds’ body in the presence of an innocent taxi driver. Police arrived. Reynolds was taken to hospital and you went to the Chelsea police station where you made the first of two lying statements you made to police professing ignorance of how Reynolds came to suffer his injuries.
When you and Williams had arrived at Tonbridge Street with the taxi driver you found Reynolds still semi-conscious but stripped of his clothing with a curtain wire tied around his neck. Except for telling your brother you did it, you have persistently denied any responsibility for taking Reynolds’ clothes off and for some time denied responsibility for tying the curtain wire around his neck. It would be impossible for me to make any finding with respect to these matters, partly because you have told a number of stories, differing in detail as to what actually occurred when you assaulted Reynolds. It is not necessary for me to do so. Neither putting the wire around Reynolds’ neck nor stripping his body naked contributed in any way to his ultimate demise. I have disregarded them in setting the sentence to be imposed upon you.
Your initial lies to the police succeeded in preventing your arrest for some time. It was only after an elaborate undercover operation by a number of police officers which lead ultimately to your confessing your part in this crime to them in the belief that you were being inducted into a criminal gang that the police were satisfied they had enough evidence to charge you with Reynolds’ murder on 9 August 2002.
Although you persisted in your story that you were not responsible for the assault on Craig Reynolds right up until a few days before your trial, the forensic reality of the evidence against you eventually lead you to concede that you had been responsible for the injuries which he had received although you still sought to avoid ultimate responsibility by resort to a defence of provocation which, as I have said, the jury rejected. Your counsel submitted that you should be given credit for conceding at least this much of the Crown case before the trial really began by submitting to the jury at the outset that you should be convicted of manslaughter. I have given you appropriate credit for this matter in fixing your sentence.
Your counsel, in a plea on your behalf, provided the Court with a brief and informative biographical note concerning your life before this momentous event overtook it. The Crown has not contested the accuracy of this note and accordingly I regard it as appropriate to rely on it as a factual basis upon which to assess your antecedents.
Your were born in Frankston on 26 December 1965 the older of two sons of Fredrick John Hill and Lyn Hill. You have no memory of your mother who apparently left the family when you were about eight years of age. Your father has told you that she had a severe drinking problem. However that may be, she now lives in Alice Springs and you have no contact with her.
You describe your school life, after the family moved to Bairnsdale when your father found work as a gas fitter in Sale, as “idyllic”. You lived on a rented farm. You remember your younger brother, your father and yourself as a cohesive family unit living on a rented farm where you and your brother spent time rabbiting, fishing and motor bike riding.
Within a couple of years of your mother's leaving your father remarried; a relationship which lasted about six years. Its end was traumatic and its effect on you was compounded by the upheaval of your moving back to the Frankston area. Prior to that move you described yourself as a young and naive teenager who did not drink, smoke, take drugs or get into trouble. You say that you were a plodder at school but had a flair for art and woodwork.
Shortly after you moved back to Frankston your father met Kaye Giles, the mother of the deceased Craig Anthony Reynolds and his brother. A relationship developed and the two families began to live together. You say that Kaye Giles’ sons were far more attuned to urban living than you were and that you missed the activities associated with farm life. You say that you began drinking “rocket fuel” – cocktails of spirits mixed from your father’s alcohol cupboard. You began to get into trouble with the police.
When you entered the work force it was as an employee of Nissan; a job which you held for about four years. You were engaged in forklift driving and stacking and soon assumed positions of general responsibility. For the most part you lived in the bungalow at the back of your paternal grandmother’s house and thought that your work and your living conditions curtailed your abuse of alcohol and the drugs to which you had been recently introduced. After being sacked from Nissan following a fight with a co-worker you experienced unemployment during which time you used amphetamines and heroin for the first time.
Notwithstanding this situation, at the age of 21, you took on an apprenticeship, eventually gaining your ticket as a carpenter within the plastering industry. Over the next seven years you say that you were virtually continuously employed on various building sites, mostly in the Melbourne CBD. This time represented a period of relative stability in your life with little use of drugs. You lived in rental accommodation and maintained a relationship with a woman to whom you became engaged. However that relationship did not last.
After seven years of working as a plasterer and a carpenter a problem with a union saw your career come to an end. You lost focus and discipline and drifted deeper and deeper into drug use. You came into more frequent contact with the law and acquired an ever increasing list of prior convictions which had commenced in 1982. They were still being added to as late as March 2003. They range across almost the full spectrum of criminal behaviour involving offences of dishonesty, violence, drug use and drug trafficking.
You are a convicted burglar and a convicted thief. You have many prior convictions for each of these offences. You have been convicted of arson, obtaining property by deception and of driving offences associated with alcohol. Over the period of your prior convictions the courts have again and again extended leniency to you in the form of non-custodial sentences in circumstances where it might have been thought that immediate incarceration was warranted. This has occurred on not one but on many occasions. You have regularly breached the trust placed in you by the courts in this regard leading to the inference that you have little or no respect for the law. You are, accordingly, unable, unlike many murderers, to come before this Court as a stranger to the inside of Victoria’s prisons.
Upon hearing the plea made on your behalf by your counsel I considered whether I should exercise the power of the Court pursuant to s 96 of the Sentencing Act1991 to order a pre-sentence report in respect of you before I passed sentence. However, as there was no submission either by your counsel or by the Crown that I ought to do so and as there was no indication that you were suffering from any particular psychological or psychiatric disability and your counsel had provided a coherent and comprehensive outline of your antecedents there seemed to be little point in delaying the sentencing process further. Accordingly I decided not to order such a report but rather to pass sentence upon you after considering all of the matters to which I have just referred. I am satisfied that you have not been disadvantaged in any way by my not having such a report.
You took a human life by inflicting horrendous injuries upon a fellow human being and then leaving him to die. Your cowardly concern subsequently was only to avoid detection. You cared nothing for him and indeed, on at least one subsequent occasion expressed the view that you were glad that you had performed the acts you did. You are not entitled to any consideration for remorse or any similar state of mind.
Craig Reynolds may well have been, like you, a drug addict or at least a drug user prepared, in pursuit of his own pleasure, to engage in dishonesty with respect to his fellow unfortunates. This gave you no right to take his life from him. That he was loved by those he was closest to is attested by the victim impact statements which have been filed in this case and which I have read. I have given them appropriate weight in determining the sentence which I am going to impose upon you.
In fixing an appropriate sentence in your case I am required to take into account the maximum sentence for this offence, namely life imprisonment. The sentence which I impose must punish you to an extent and in a manner which is just in all the circumstances. It must seek to deter you and other people from committing offences of the same kind. It must establish conditions to facilitate your rehabilitation if that is possible. It must denounce the conduct in which you engaged and it must protect the community from you so far as that can be achieved consistent with justice.
The sentence I am about to impose will mean that you will spend most of your middle years in gaol. When you are eligible for parole you will not be the same person you are today. You will have been changed by the prison environment in which you will live. It is to be hoped that that, of itself, will bring you to the realisation that living your life in total disregard for the welfare of your fellow human beings is not only wrong and destructive of those with whom you come into contact but is also destructive of yourself and, likely to lead to even further imprisonment. The community will certainly be protected from you for the period you are in gaol. It is to be hoped that it will not need to be protected from you after you are released and that you will have realised that there is no profit from your point of view in continuing to break the law.
The sentence of the Court is that you be imprisoned for 18 years. It is further ordered that you serve a minimum of 15 years before being eligible for parole. I declare that the period of pre-sentence detention which you have served in respect of this sentence up to today is 224 days and I direct that this declaration and its effect be entered in the records of the Court.
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