Regina v Thomas William Hudson
[2007] NSWDC 260
•9 February 2007
NEW SOUTH WALES DISTRICT COURT
CITATION: Regina v Thomas William Hudson [2007] NSWDC 260
FILE NUMBER(S):
06/11/0371
HEARING DATE(S):
JUDGMENT DATE: 9 February 2007
EX TEMPORE DATE: 9 February 2007
PARTIES:
Regina
Thomas William Hudson
JUDGMENT OF: Finnane QC DCJ
COUNSEL:
Mr G Rowling for the Crown
Mr J Fliece for the Offender
SOLICITORS:
Ms J Brown for NSW DPP
MJ Woods & Co for the Offender
CATCHWORDS:
sentence
parity of sentence
ephedrine
methylamphetmaine
conspiracy to manufacture
prohibited drug
high chances or re-offending
lack of remorse
little in way of special circumstances
role of offender
age of offender as possible deterrence to re-offending
LEGISLATION CITED:
CASES CITED:
DECISION:
In relation to each matter I impose on the offender a sentence of three years imprisonment, with three years non parole. That sentence will go in each case from the 17th of August 2006 to the 16th of August 2009 and the balance from the 17th of August 2009 to the 16th of August 2011. He is to be released on the 16th of August 2009 to parole.
As I have said each sentence is to be concurrent.
JUDGMENT:
SENTENCE
HIS HONOUR: The offender Thomas William Hudson, who was born on the 12th of April 1947, comes before me today for sentence following his conviction at a trial, which lasted from the 11th of September 2006 to the 26th of October 2006. He was charged with three counts. One of attempting to manufacture ephedrine on the 7th of September 2004 at Coopernook, the second being between the 7th of September 2004 and the 30th of September 2004 of manufacturing a prohibited drug namely methylamphetamine, and the third between the 1st of September 2003 and the 5th of August 2005 conspiring with John Henry Griffiths and others to manufacture ephedrine.
He was convicted of the first and third counts. In relation to the second count the jury found him guilty of attempting to manufacture methylamphetamine. The maximum penalty for each offence is imprisonment for 15 years and a monetary penalty of $220,000. From what has been put to me about his circumstances it would not be appropriate to consider a fine.
The evidence given at the trial establishes that he lived in rented accommodation in a semi-rural area near Wyong with his wife and some childrenand worked in an area associated with the building industry on and off.
During the course of the trial John Henry Griffiths, who was mentioned in the third count, came and gave evidence. Griffiths is a man who is a trained pharmacist. The offender is a man of little education and little intellectual attainment. Griffiths however is a very clever, intelligent and highly educated man. He is also a liar, a cheat and a criminal. The offender, together with Griffiths, a man called William Joseph Campbell and Allan Sydney Bangs were involved in this conspiracy to manufacture ephedrine from about the 7th of September 2004 until about the 5th of August 2005.
Campbell and Bangs also gave evidence at the trial; they gave evidence for the Crown. Each of them came from a country area. Each of them was relatively uneducated and unsophisticated. All four these people are motivated by greed and had the aim of manufacturing ephedrine, which is a precursor drug to methylamphetamine. The reason they wished to manufacture ephedrine and later methylamphetamine was so they could sell it and make some money. During the course of the trial it became apparent that something of the order of $40,000 was contemplated. In the scheme of the manufacture of illegal drugs this was a very small amount of money indeed.
During the years in question, Griffiths was a man living in rented accommodation in Dulwich Hill. Bangs and Campbell lived in northern New South Wales and the offender lived near Wyong.
Griffiths knew how to manufacture illegal drugs. The others had no idea at all and their role was really to assist him. The main assistance that the offender provided to Mr Griffiths was to provide his house as a place to which chemicals could be sent, to allow the name of a company to be placed on his letterbox to give the appearance that a chemical company was in some way headquartered there, to receive chemicals that were sent there in a false name and to permit Griffiths to use his fax machine and his computer for the purpose of sending communications to chemical companies and chemical suppliers.
The purchase of chemicals involved Griffiths, with the assistance of the offender, giving false names to the suppliers of chemicals and giving false information as to the reason that the chemicals were wanted. At a later point Campbell and Bangs were involved in the purchase of glassware, also in false names.
Griffiths had a recipe for the manufacture of ephedrine and methylamphetamine from the ephedrine. That recipe was found in the offender’s premises when the Police raided them. The recipe was used as a way of making ephedrine so that the authorities would be less likely to detect what was going on, than if attempts were made directly to get the drugs that had large quantities of ephedrine in them. There is no doubt in my mind that Griffiths was the person who thought up this scheme.
The scheme also involved another curious aspect. Griffiths, when caught by the authorities and the offender when caught, both claimed they were making an ephedrine like substance but it was not ephedrine, and they were really interested in making Viagra for sale in China or in Indonesia. These false claims were maintained at this trial by Griffiths, who was called on behalf of the offender.
Griffiths, at the trial, maintained he was an innocent man, although previously he had pleaded guilty and been sentenced for his part in this conspiracy. Griffiths and the offender attempted to blame Campbell and Bangs and portray each of them as being the major figures in a drug ring. The offender did this during the course of his giving evidence and by the way in which he cross-examined people. Griffiths also did this when he gave evidence. These claims were manifestly false and utterly absurd.
For the purpose of the trial the offender gave a notice of an alibi. The alibi, which was a partial alibi only, sought to rely on a conversation he had with a woman who is missing, presumed murdered and who has been missing presumed murdered for many years; a fact that he knew since he was originally charged with the murder, although acquitted of it. The alibi itself was a manifestly false one and the jury in convicting the offender of these offences obviously took that view.
On the 7th and 8th of September the four men involved were at Coopernook. At Coopernook Griffiths attempted to manufacture ephedrine. To some extent he was assisted by Campbell and Bangs, although their assistance appears to have been of a fairly unskilled nature. The offender was present at the property but did not take any very active part in the manufacture. However, he drove Griffiths to the property knowing what was going to be done and was prepared to participate with him in the manufacture of the ephedrine. As it turned out Griffiths did this very poorly and ultimately managed to manufacture only a quantity of pink rock substance and in the course of this managed also to damage the equipment that was being used to mix the chemical substances.
The next step in the process was that the offender then went to Campbell’s residence at a place called Whiporie. Glassware was obtained by Campbell and Campbell and the prisoner took the glassware to his residence and attempted there to manufacture methylamphetamine, again using the recipe that Griffiths had provided. As the offender and Campbell were both uneducated and unskilled the result was not terribly good. The methylamphetamine that was produced was in fact something that chemically was methylamphetamine, but it did not have the quality of affecting behaviour that would make it attractive to a user of illegal drugs, and attempts by Bangs to sell the drugs were unsuccessful. Bangs returned what he attempted to sell to the offender.
Thereafter and until the arrest of Griffiths on the 5th of August 2005 the offender, Griffiths, Campbell and Bangs all participated in attempts to acquire chemicals for the further manufacture of the ephedrine. I have referred earlier to false names being used by Griffiths and they were, amongst other things, Michael Nelson, Venom Aromatics, Trilla Barron and Louisiana Aromatics.
Of the four only the offender chose to plead not guilty. Griffiths pleaded guilty on the 1st of August 2006 for the offence of conspiring with the other persons mentioned here and asked that another offence be taken into account. He was given a non-parole period of two years and a balance of the term of one year.
Mr Campbell was sentenced by his Honour Judge Black and received a non-parole period of twelve months and a balance of one year and three months. He did not offer to give assistance to the Crown and received no discount on sentence, but in fact turned up voluntarily as a witness in the trial. I thought he appeared to me to be a very good witness.
Bangs received a non-parole period of six months with a balance of term of twelve months. This sentence was imposed by his Honour Judge Coolahan. The sentence was suspended. His Honour took into account an offer by Bangs to give assistance to the authorities.
The offender’s role in this enterprise, because all three charges in reality concern one enterprise only, was more serious than that of Campbell or Bangs. It is clear that he acted as a significant go-between and an organiser and an arranger of events. The offender is a man who has previous convictions. They go back as far as 1963 when he appeared before a Children’s Court. The convictions which have been imposed upon him were for a variety of offences, some relatively minor and some quite serious in their nature.
He has a number of drug offence convictions and has been sentenced to imprisonment on more than one occasion for drug offences. Many of these seem to have been committed in the area around Gosford and Wyong. On the 11th of May 1987 he was given a five-year sentence with a three-year non-parole period for supplying heroin. He has also been convicted of offering bribes; possessing prohibited firearms and supplying prohibited drugs.
The telephone intercepts that were played satisfy me that he is a person who is part of the normal criminal milieu of drug distributors in the Gosford area and had been for some years. In a number of the calls he expressed considerable surprise that the Police involved in the current proceedings were not attempting to fabricate evidence against him, it apparently being his experience in the past that that had occurred. It is certainly true that in the past in the Gosford area there was a very well known Detective Sergeant, Sergeant Eade, who was exposed during the Police Royal commission for his part in protecting drug suppliers and for his part in fabricating evidence against them.
It may be to people such as this that the offender was referring. I must say the Police in this case deserve commendation for the extremely high quality of their investigations and the care with which everything was put together, and I hope that is passed on to them.
What occurred turned into a type of farce. The pink rock, which was produced, occurred following an explosion. The persons concerned in this conspiracy gained nothing from it financially, in fact all of them lost money. All of them were arrested and as it turned out, although their intention was to pass drugs on to the community, they did not succeed in doing so.
On behalf of the prisoner a psychological report was presented by Mr W John Taylor, a well-known psychologist. The report, I have to say, does not show anything terribly much about him, apart from the fact that he has average intellectual ability, does not have a personality disorder or significant emotional disturbance, is not a drug addict, has no delusional disorders and he has good family relationships. He has a wife and four children and they all live with him.
Mr Taylor expresses the opinion that he has a low to moderate risk of recidivism. I do not agree with that. I think there is every chance that Mr Hudson will commit offences of this nature again. He has committed them before; I can see nothing in him that suggests he will cease committing them.
He had a right to plead not guilty and he exercised that right. In the course of that right he gave evidence. The evidence itself was largely, if not entirely, false. He continued to maintain that he was not involved in the manufacturing of illegal drugs but was interested in the manufacture of a Viagra-like substance. He has not resiled from that approach in any way. He shows no evidence to me of any form of contrition.
The only thing that could be said that might indicate that in the future he might not be involved is his age. He was born in 1947 and he is now well past his middle sixties. One would hope that his involvement in this sad episode would persuade him not to be involved again.
When it comes to sentence, taking into account the fact that he has previous convictions, there is no sign of remorse or contrition, there is little that can be said by way of special circumstances. The sentence which would appear to me to have been appropriate would be one of five years non-parole with a head sentence of seven years. However I have to take into account, it seems to me, that he was not really the directing party in this entire episode. He was Mr Griffiths’ lieutenant. Mr Griffiths was the real ringleader. He was the man with the intellectual knowledge and he was the man that worked out what should be done.
Her Honour Judge Tupman imposed on Mr Griffiths a sentence, which, on one view of it, seems to be rather mild. Her Honour took into account that he was seventy-two years of age and he had various health problems and he would find it hard to adjust in the community when he came out. There was no one with whom he had any close relationship. Sympathetic considerations appear to me to have overborne the reality of Mr Griffiths’ real criminality.
However there has been no Crown appeal from that sentence and it would seem to me quite unfair to impose on the offender that is much greater than the sentence imposed on Mr Griffiths, since Mr Griffiths’ criminality is of a much higher order. Therefore, although I would have been inclined to have imposed a sentence that would have seen him in gaol for five years I have decided I should not do that.
Mr Griffiths was of course entitled to some remissions on his sentence by virtue of the fact he pleaded guilty. The offender has chosen to plead not guilty. He does not get any greater sentence for pleading not guilty but he gets no remission.
The appropriate sentence it seems to me is one that will see him serving three years in prison, with an additional two years on parole. That appears to me to give some parity with Mr Griffiths’ sentence.
HIS HONOUR: I would ask Counsel to check that I am correct that as I would see it he was in custody between the 31st of October 05 and the 12th of January 06 and then from the 26th of October 2006. If that is so I should give him the benefit of seventy-five days served before the 26th of October 2006 and that would take it back to the 15th of August 2006. If that is not right tell me. I can make mistakes with these calculations.
BROWN: We worked out just before that it was seventy-three days.
FLIECE: Seventy-three days your Honour.
HIS HONOUR: All right, well that would be the 17th of August 2006. Each offence is a serious offence. In reality all of these offences, though serious, are part of the one big transaction. Therefore I should impose a sentence for each matter but I make each sentence concurrent.
In relation to each matter I impose on the offender a sentence of three years imprisonment, with three years non-parole. That sentence will go in each case from the 17th of August 2006 to the 16th of August 2009 and the balance from the 17th of August 2009 to the 16th of August 2011. He is to be released on the 16th of August 2009 to parole.
As I have said each sentence is to be concurrent. I do not think there is any other matter I have to deal with is there?
FLIECE: Your Honour there is one matter that I think I need to remind your Honour of because I think your Honour’s sentencing remarks may suggest that there has been a factual error. You made a finding of fact that ephedrine was actually produced at Coopernook. I would remind your Honour that count one, the charge laid by the Crown there was--
HIS HONOUR: Count two; there was an attempt to produce - sorry, you are quite right. What was produced at Coopernook was a pink rock substance, from that they attempted to manufacture methylamphetamine, you are quite right. However in terms of sentence it matters not a wit, whether it is an attempt to manufacture it, was a manufacture of it. The sentence is the same.
FLIECE: Similarly your Honour in relation to count 2 you will remember--
HIS HONOUR: It was an attempt to manufacture. That was what the jury convicted him of. Again I will correct that but in terms of sentence it does not matter whether it was an attempt or an actual manufacture. I would again emphasise that the whole venture was extremely unsuccessful and nothing of any use was ever manufactured. Well I do not think I have got any other sort of loose charges have I, or have I? Sometimes there are these matters referred from Magistrate’s courts that have got to be finalised but I do not think there are, are there?
BROWN: No there are not your Honour. One thing, you could make an order regarding the destruction of all exhibits.
HIS HONOUR: Well not all exhibits but the destruction of the drugs.
BROWN: I think also there are some outstanding materials relating to Griffiths as well if you are able to also make that order.
HIS HONOUR: What drugs that he attempted to manufacture?
BROWN: Yes.
HIS HONOUR: Well I will order that all illegal drugs be destroyed, however I do not think that should be done until the period for appeal has passed just in case something should occur, I don’t imagine it would.
All right Mr Hudson you have got three years from the 17th of August 2006. The offender may be removed.
Again I commend the police on the thoroughness of their work, I thought it was very good. I only hope the Crown passes on to the Commissioner my compliments.
BROWN: Yes your Honour, thank you.
HIS HONOUR: Very often, unfortunately I have to at least mildly deprecate the standard investigation. But in this case the investigation was of very high order I must say.
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LAST UPDATED: 10 December 2007
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