COURT: Stand up, please. I have to sentence you on your pleas of guilty to offences of robbery, carrying an offensive weapon and theft.
In 1994, for two offences of robbery, you were sentenced to a total of 7½ years’ imprisonment. In 2007, you were sentenced for two cases of robbery and one case of conspiracy to rob, to a total of 8 years’ imprisonment. You were released from the last sentence on 22 December 2012. And then just a little over three months later, on 29 March 2013, you have committed the robbery which is count 1 on this indictment.
Two days later you committed the robbery, which is the subject of the 2nd count. In both cases a knife was carried and used. It was displayed in the first robbery and actually used to inflict injury in the second, albeit the injury was not serious. In each case, the robbery was carried out at night, it was planned, you targeted lone women in lonely places in the public street or road.
In the first robbery, you took the lady’s mobile telephone and $20. She suffered no injury but she must have been terrified. In the second robbery, you threw sand into the eyes of the victim when she turned around. She put up a fight and you used violence to carry out the robbery. You took a thousand dollars. She had small cuts or abrasions to her face and cuts to her hand and you kicked her in the groin when she was on the ground.
The 3rd count involves you carrying an offensive weapon when you were arrested. It was a knife. The 4th count relates to the theft of the bicycle that was used in the offences.
The guideline case of Mo Kwong Sang leads me to look at a starting point of 5 years for the first robbery and 7 years for the second robbery. You earn a third discount for your pleas of guilty and without looking to the aggravation that exists because of your previous convictions, I shall take those starting points and impose, after the discount, a sentence of 3 years and 4 months on count 1 and 4 years and 8 months on count 2. On the 3rd count, there will be a sentence of 16 months, discounted from a 2 year starting point and on the 4th count, a sentence of 1 month.
I have listened carefully to the very thorough mitigation that your counsel has made on your behalf. I bear in mind that the pleas of guilty were made when the evidence may not have been there to convict you on a trial, because the victims were unable to identify you. I bear that in mind when it comes to working out how I should relate these sentences to each other.
And I also bear in mind what your counsel puts before me, based on the reports that I have seen, that concerning the sort of man you are and the sort of life you have led. You have been diagnosed with a dissocial personality disorder and you are of borderline intelligence and you counsel sums it up, I believe accurately, when he says that you appear to have a limited capacity to cope with life. But I do bear this in mind, it cannot be so limited that you could have failed to know right from wrong, that you could have failed not to appreciate what you were doing when you robbed these women.
I cannot ignore the aggravation that comes from the repetition of serious robberies and previous long terms of imprisonment passed upon you have not deterred you. I have not used that aggravation to increase the individual sentences I pronounced, but I do bear that aggravation in mind when it comes to making the sentence on the 2nd count, wholly consecutive to that on the 1st count.
In doing that, I have also balanced those features of the mitigation which I have summarised as saying that you have difficulty coping with life and the fact is, the public do need to be protected from a man like you. Your problems with life will have scant impact on the experience that your victims went through.
In my judgment, the least sentence I can pass in total is one of 8 years’ imprisonment which is the consecutive sentences on counts 1 and 2 and in the light of totality, I shall make the sentences of 16 months on count 3 and 1 month on count 4 concurrent to all of the other sentences. The total is 8 years’ imprisonment.