STATE OF TASMANIA v BARRY JOHN ELDRIDGE 12 AUGUST 2019
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE BLOW CJ
Barry John Eldridge, you have pleaded guilty to a charge of arson. In March of this year you were living as a squatter in an unoccupied house in Goulburn Street near the edge of Hobart’s central business district. There had been a number of other squatters living there. You believed that one of them had stolen your possessions. You had been drinking. You got angry. You started a fire, and it burnt out the house. Nobody was in the house, but the owners suffered a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars, for which they were not covered by insurance. The house had to be demolished.
Fires like this sometimes pose a danger to nearby buildings. They can spread. Fires pose a danger to the people who have to try to put them out. On this occasion, a lot of firefighters and a lot of police officers had to attend to deal with the situation you had created. You probably did not think about the consequences of your actions. It certainly looks as if you did not think about the loss that you were going to cause to the owners. This was a serious fire, and I am going to have to impose a substantial prison sentence because of it.
To make matters worse, you were on bail on other charges at the time of the fire. And you had a suspended sentence hanging over your head at the time of the fire. Suspended sentences are always suspended on condition that the offender is not to commit any offence punishable by imprisonment. That is what you did when you started this fire. But you had already committed a number of other offences punishable by imprisonment, so that suspended sentence has since been activated and served.
You have been in custody since the day of the fire. The following four months are months that have been covered by the suspended sentence that was activated, and two months of another sentence imposed by a magistrate that was partly suspended, so I will be backdating your sentence to 14 July.
There are things that count in your favour. You pleaded guilty at an early stage. Your case was not prepared for trial. That probably warrants a discount of something like 20% from the sentence that I would otherwise have imposed. You have had a really unfortunate life. You have been homeless since you were 16. You are now 23. You have never been able to find employment. You are a disability support pensioner because of depression and anxiety. You had a really unfortunate childhood involving treatment for a lymphoma condition, bullying at school, a falling out with your family that left you homeless, and problems with drug use from the age of 12. Prison obviously is going to be an even more unpleasant experience for you than it is for most people. But you know that; you have been there for nearly five months.
It was not a planned fire. It was something unplanned and impulsive. But it caused an enormous amount of damage, and that has to be reflected in the sentence that I am going to impose. I will impose the shortest possible non-parole period because of your personal circumstances and your need for help.
I convict you and sentence you to two years’ imprisonment with effect from 14 July 2019. You will not be eligible for parole until you have served one year of this sentence. I order you to pay Mary Lymbouris and George Lymbouris compensation for the damage suffered by them. I adjourn the assessment of that compensation sine die. That is Latin, it means without date.