STATE OF TASMANIA v AARON MAXWELL COCKER 20 NOVEMBER 2020
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE BLOW CJ
Aaron Maxwell Cocker, you have pleaded guilty to a charge under the Criminal Code of assaulting a police officer. You have also pleaded guilty to four summary offences that I am dealing with under s 385A of the Criminal Code. All of the charges relate to a single incident. The summary charges are charges of assaulting a police officer, resisting a police officer, threatening a police officer and using abusive language to police officers.
This incident occurred at your home on 4 July 2019. A number of police officers came to your home looking for a man for whom they had an arrest warrant. You were in bed. As they searched the house they conducted a check and discovered that there was a live warrant for your arrest as well. That took you by surprise. I infer that you must have overlooked a court appearance and that a magistrate must have issued a warrant for your arrest as a result. The police officers told you that you were under arrest, and all went well until they insisted on handcuffing you. You did not like that idea. You over-reacted. It was at a bad time in your life. You had been suffering from depression at a time when a relationship had broken up, and you reacted with hostility.
The first thing you did was to push a female officer to the chest when she was proffering the handcuffs that she wanted to place on you. That is the subject of the summary charge of assaulting police. Then the officers attempted to restrain you but you resisted arrest by thrashing your body and refusing to place your hands behind your back. There was a scuffle. You said to a male officer, “I’m going to punch you in a minute” and “Wait till I see you out on the street”. You called the police “mutts” and “cunts”, and finally you committed the crime that you are charged with, by spitting into the face of one of the officers, your saliva making contact with that officer’s face and eyes. In the course of the struggle you inserted a finger into that officer’s mouth, he had bitten it, and you had started to bleed. You over-reacted to that by spitting into the officer’s face and eyes. You did not think about the likely impact of that spitting, but the officer had to have tests conducted for diseases like AIDS and hepatitis, and possibly others. This of course was before the COVID-19 pandemic. So it is for all of that conduct that I now have to sentence you.
You were 35 years old then and you are 37 now. You have an excellent employment record. You have been working without any significant interruption ever since you left school at the end of year 10. You have apparently played football all your adult life without ever getting into trouble for inappropriate conduct on the football field. You have a lot of prior convictions, but only one for assault, in 2009, and only one in relation to your behaviour towards police officers. That was for using abusive language to an officer in 2012. You have never been to prison until this year. You have never been sentenced to community service. You had a suspended sentence in 2009. I am told that you are serving a sentence of six months’ imprisonment for driving offences. It appears that they are offences that were committed after this incident. There are a number of other things that count in your favour. You pleaded guilty, and you have ultimately been co-operative with the police.
I have read a victim impact statement from the officer whose face you spat into. It was 12 months before he was given the all clear by doctors. The uncertainty about whether you had transmitted any sort of disease and the fear of something like this happening again has resulted in a strain on that officer’s relationship with his partner and in some degree of anxiety on the part of the officer. It was no doubt a terrible experience for that officer because of the fear of contracting an infectious disease. Police officers have an important job to do. They do not know which of the people they are dealing with might have AIDS or hepatitis or some other unpleasant disease. Mostly, when people spit into their faces, it takes several months before an officer can be cleared, and in this case it took 12 months.
In all the circumstances I think the only appropriate penalty is another prison sentence. Because you are already serving one, I am going to make it shorter than I otherwise would. And because of the circumstances, I am going to suspend most of it.
I convict you and sentence you to 3 months’ imprisonment cumulatively with the sentence you are currently serving. I suspend 2 months of that sentence on condition that you commit no offence punishable by imprisonment for a period of 18 months after your release from prison.