STATE OF TASMANIA v THOMAS HENRY COHEN 7 FEBRUARY 2020
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE BLOW CJ
Thomas Henry Cohen, you have pleaded guilty to a charge of assault. The victim of the assault was your partner’s father. You assaulted him in the middle of the night, on a Saturday night in May of last year. He was very drunk. He was making a nuisance of himself. He was at your residence. The neighbours had complained. You and your partner were trying to calm him down. All that you wanted to do was have a night’s sleep, but he was preventing you from doing that. He said words that made it obvious that he was challenging you to a fight. He put his hand on your shoulder. You were entitled to defend yourself, but you over-reacted. You swung around, and you punched him twice to the face. As he was falling to the floor, you grabbed him round the shoulder area, and you punched him to the face two more times. He ended up unconscious. The police were called and you were arrested and charged.
You did not intend to cause any permanent injury to your partner’s father, but you did cause him what seems to be a permanent physical injury. There was a laceration inside his mouth. He had to have a plate put in. In a statement that he made two months ago, he reported that he is only able to eat on the right hand side. Parts of his face are numb. His nose runs continuously on one side. And it is apparently quite common for people who have suffered this sort of injury not to make a full recovery. The man had problems with anxiety and depression before this assault. Those problems are worse.
You were 25 years old when this happened and you are now 26. You have a number of convictions for offences involving violence. In 2012 you were dealt with by a magistrate on a number of charges, including a charge of assaulting a police officer. It looks like that was a minor assault because you were simply released and ordered to be of good behaviour. No conviction was recorded. In 2017 you assaulted a man by punching him to the face, and a magistrate fined you for that the following year. Very significantly, on 24 March last year, you assaulted a man and a woman by punching each of them to the face. You were on bail on those two assault charges at the time of the assault that I am concerned with. So, you committed those assaults in March. You were released on bail. And then, on 29 April, you assaulted someone who appears to have been a member of your partner’s family, by grabbing her hair from behind and pulling her down onto her back. You were given police bail in relation to that. Then, about four weeks later, you committed this crime, when you were on bail on three assault charges.
If it had not been for those three assault charges, I would have done what the magistrate did the other day, and sentenced you to community service. But, because you were on bail on those three other assault charges, and because of the seriousness of the attack on your partner’s father, I think the time has come for you to go to prison for the first time, and I hope it is the only time.
There are matters that count in your favour. You had been provoked. The man was making a terrible nuisance of himself. You have a problem with anger management that appears to be related to a mental health problem. You co-operated with the police after you were arrested, and you pleaded guilty at an early stage. So I am going to suspend some of your sentence.
I convict you and sentence you to six months’ imprisonment. I suspend three months of that sentence on condition that you commit no offence punishable by imprisonment within two years after your release from prison.