STATE OF TASMANIA v SHAUN ANDREW BLAKE 3 MAY 2019
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE BLOW CJ
Shaun Andrew Blake, you have pleaded guilty to a charge of attempted armed robbery and a charge of armed robbery. These charges related to incidents that occurred within about 15 minutes of one another on 12 January this year.
First of all, on that afternoon you went to a newsagency at Invermay. You were armed with a screwdriver. You were wearing a puffer jacket with the hood pulled up over your head and a bicycle helmet on under the hood. Because you were wearing that headgear, that makes things a bit worse for you than they otherwise would have been because that would have made you look particularly alarming and threatening to the people that you held up. There were two staff members in the newsagency – a woman in her late 30s, and a teenage girl in her first job. You directed your demands to the woman in her 30s. You menaced her with the screwdriver and demanded money from the till. But she activated an alarm and you fled.
This was a particularly upsetting experience for the two staff members. I have received victim impact statements from both of them. They both had a range of psychological consequences. They both needed counselling. They both have ongoing psychological symptoms as a result of what you did.
You did this because you were a drug user. You were consuming a quantity of methylamphetamine each day whose cost was out of all proportion to the income that you were getting from a Newstart allowance. Having been unsuccessful at Invermay, you went to the Pizza Hut at Mowbray. You had committed an armed robbery there once before. You went in there, this time armed with a small axe. You demanded money from the proprietor, and you got away with $395. I do not have a victim impact statement from him. I have no idea of how disturbing he has found that. One of the problems with robberies is that people sometimes develop really serious psychiatric symptoms months or years down the track. So that is what is important about this robbery – the risk of psychiatric harm to the man you robbed, not so much the $395.
You are 39 years old. You had a terrible upbringing. It is perhaps not surprising that that has led to you having terrible drug problems and getting into trouble repeatedly as a result. But that does not, by any means, excuse what you have done. Amongst your other convictions you have four prior convictions for armed robbery and one for robbery. You are getting longer and longer sentences for this. Today I have to sentence you for two crimes, not one, so obviously you are headed for a heavy sentence.
There is not much for me to take into account in your favour. There is your terrible upbringing. There is the fact that you co-operated with the police, made full admissions, and pleaded guilty at an early stage in the Magistrates Court. There is the fact that you are sorry for the people that you held up. Very importantly, there is the fact that you want to overcome your drug problem, and that you have been trying to do that for years. You know better than I do how hard it is to overcome a drug problem, so I will not lecture you about that. But you are conscious of the fact that you promised your mother before she died that you would overcome your problem and would not go back to gaol. You are conscious of the fact that your daughter has now broken off all contact with you because of your behaviour. You might like to think about the fact that she is only two or three years younger than the young shop assistant who was there in the newsagency. So those things do count in your favour, but really they weigh in favour of provision for parole, more so than they weigh in favour of a lenient sentence.
To make matters worse, you breached the condition of a suspended sentence by committing these crimes. You were involved in an attempted carjacking with another man back in September 2017. A judge in March of last year sentenced you to 10 months for that, with three months of that sentence suspended on condition that you commit no offence punishable by imprisonment for three years. Well, that sentence was imposed in March 2018. You committed these crimes only about 10 months later in January 2019, and for some of that intervening period you were in prison. So you have not done too well. I have to activate the suspended three months unless I consider that that would be unjust. It plainly would not be unjust, so I am going to activate that.
Because the sentence that I am going to give you for the armed robbery and attempted armed robbery comes on top of that, I have to take that into account, and I am going to do that by overlapping a month of the new sentence with the three months that I have to activate. But obviously the only appropriate sentence is a long sentence of imprisonment. I will make provision for parole because of the encouraging signs that you want to do something about your drug addiction.
I activate the three month suspended component of the sentence of imprisonment imposed on 6 March 2018 in respect of complaint number 9262/17, with effect from 18 January 2019. In respect of the indictment, I convict you and sentence you to four years six months’ imprisonment with effect from 18 March 2019. I order that you are not to be eligible for parole until you have served three years of that sentence. I order that you pay Chintakuma Patel $395 as compensation for his loss.
I specify that the total period of imprisonment that you are liable to serve is four years eight months; that it commenced on 18 January 2019; that the sentence of four years six months’ imprisonment is partly concurrent with the activated three month component of the suspended sentence, to the extent that one month thereof is concurrent and the balance not.