STATE OF TASMANIA v SIMON PETER FROSI 16 JUNE 2020
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE PEARCE J
Simon Frosi, you plead guilty to armed robbery. I also agreed to deal with your plea of guilty to the summary charge of resisting a police officer. Just after 10pm on Friday, 27 December 2019 you entered the Mood Food Service Station in Wellington Street in Launceston. You produced a pair of scissors which you pointed across the counter towards the 22 year old male attendant working near the till and demanded that he give you money. When the attendant did not immediately respond you repeated the request. More than once you threatened to come behind the counter if the attendant did not comply. The attendant gave you $500 from the till in $50 notes which you took and walked off.
You were not disguised and were easily recognisable from the images on the security camera. There were customers in the store at the time, although they seemed to be unaware of what had happened. The police were called. By the time they arrived you had gone. However, you were found a day later in the house in which you had been squatting. You immediately asked them whether it was about what had happened at Mood Food. Although you were generally co-operative, you did not wish to be handcuffed and you resisted the police attempts to do so by continually pulling your hands away. You were interviewed at the police station and you fully admitted what you had done. You told the police that you were angry, that you had consumed alcohol and some cannabis, you were hungry and you had run out of money. However you used the money, you said, at least in part, to buy drugs.
On your behalf your counsel gave me a report dated 21 May 2020 from Dr Michael Jordan, an experienced and highly qualified forensic psychiatrist. Dr Jordan saw you while you were in prison. The following summary of your personal circumstances and the circumstances which led to the crime come from your counsel’s submissions and from Dr Jordan’s report. You are 32. Your mother was very young when you were born in Melbourne in 1987. You have not known your father. Your mother worked in many jobs in many locations during your early life. Largely due to her single minded focus and effort, you are an educated and intelligent man. You have a bachelor’s degree in music performance from the Tasmanian Conservatorium and, in 2011, you were awarded an Honours degree in music from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University. You are an accomplished pianist. However, throughout your life you have exhibited signs of substance abuse, which, following your graduation, began to escalate. As a result of an interdependant combination of mental health problems and illicit drug use, your life, over the last few years, has spiralled out of control. Some of your mental health issues derive from your perceived inability to successfully pursue a career in music. By 2018 you were using methylamphetamine. You rejected the stabilising influence of your mother and grandmother, who lived in King Island. Your situation became so dire that you made numerous suicide attempts. One such attempt in Melbourne in February 2019 resulted in serious and disabling injuries and a lengthy hospital admission. The injury to your arm, in turn, added to your problems by interfering with your much valued ability to play the piano. You were provided with some treatment for your mental health. In July 2019 you were transferred from King Island to intensive care in Launceston with a diagnosis of drug induced psychosis. In September 2019 there was a short psychiatric admission. The efforts of community support services were to no avail. Following your discharge your life became itinerant and nihilistic. You resorted to stealing. You continued to use methylamphetamine with intermittent paranoid and psychotic symptoms. Towards the end of 2019, you decided to commit offences in the misguided belief that it would enable the treatment you required. On 24 December 2019, in your efforts to be arrested, you stole clothing from Kmart. You stole a car and drove it for a short distance before leaving the keys on a police car. You even attempted to steal a police car in the presence of the officers who were driving it. When you were arrested you were charged and bailed. Three days later, on 27 December 2019, you decided, after you had been drinking, to commit the crime for which you are now to be sentenced. The explanation for the crime now offered is not entirely consistent with the explanation you gave the police at the time, but no issue is taken by the State. It is in your favour that you pleaded guilty at an early stage. The shop attendant will be aware that he will not be required to give evidence, and justice is facilitated at a time when trials are significantly delayed by the pandemic. You have a record for alcohol related driving offences. However, you have no record for violence. You had no record for dishonesty until you committed the offences on 24 December 2019 to which I have referred, and they are not prior convictions for sentencing purposes, although it is aggravating that you were on bail at the time of this crime. Although a magistrate convicted you of those offences, no further penalty was imposed.
Dr Jordan does not suggest that your psychiatric condition provides exculpation for your criminal acts. Nor was it submitted that, or suggested in Dr Jordan’s report, that impaired mental functioning at the time of offending reduced your moral culpability or the need for general deterrence. To use Dr Jordan’s words, most of your psychiatric issues relate back to substance abuse complicated by your sensitive and brittle personality. He says that you would benefit from, on your release, engagement with drug and alcohol rehabilitation services and psychological therapy. In his opinion, enforced abstinence in prison has led to improvement in your condition and, provided you remain abstinent, you are unlikely to develop a more pervasive psychiatric disorder. I also accept that you are not a person with a general propensity to commit criminal acts, and if you properly address your substance abuse and mental health problems, you are unlikely to re-offend. However, on the same basis, I do not accept that there is no need for specific deterrence. There must be an incentive to refrain from drug and alcohol abuse and for you to maintain the treatment you require. Because you will be returning to King Island to live, there will be the opportunity for your family to keep a close eye on you. However it is not possible for Community Corrections to supervise you in that location. I have decided that these sentencing aims can be achieved by suspending part of the sentence and allowing the earliest opportunity for parole. Assuming you are granted parole I would have every reason to believe that you can return to the community as a very valuable member of it.
Both your counsel and counsel for the State submit that your crime is at the lesser end of the scale of seriousness for the crime of armed robbery. This was an unsophisticated enterprise committed in desperate circumstances. It was relatively spontaneous. You did not wear a disguise. It did not last long. The amount of money you stole is relatively inconsequential. However, every armed robbery such as this is serious. The main reason is the potential effect on victims, who are often very badly affected. Crimes in which people in bottle shops, taxis, service stations and suburban shops are being terrorised by armed persons demanding money are all too prevalent. In this case I have no victim impact statement from the young man you confronted, but that does not mean that there is no impact. There may be many reasons he chose not to provide such a statement. Being confronted by a threat of violence made by an armed man is a terrifying experience which can have lifelong effects. The State accepts that you, when interviewed, displayed some insight into the potential impact of what you had done. The punishment you deserve is also to serve as a signal to others aimed at protecting the community, to the extent that it can be achieved by a sentencing court, from crimes like this in the future. It was not a serious case of resisting police. In light of the sentence I am about to impose for the robbery, it is only necessary to record a conviction for that offence. You have been in custody since your arrest on 28 December 2019.
You are convicted on count 2 on complaint 36235/19, the resist police. On that count I make no further order. You are convicted on the indictment. I make a compensation order in favour of Mood Food Service Station in the sum of $500. I may only allow 28 days to pay that amount, but you may enter into a repayment arrangement. You are sentenced to imprisonment for two years from 27 December 2019. I suspend one year of that sentence for 18 months from your release. It is a condition of that order that you do not commit an offence punishable by imprisonment while the order is in force. If you breach that condition then you will be required to serve the rest of the term unless that is unjust. I order that you not be eligible for parole until you have served half of the operative part of the term I have just imposed.