STATE OF TASMANIA v JAMIE REGINALD HALL 7 OCTOBER 2019
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE BLOW CJ
Jamie Reginald Hall, you have pleaded guilty to a charge of assault. You have been in prison since August 2013. This assault was committed at the prison early in May of last year, when you had been in prison for nearly five years. The man that you assaulted was serving a sentence for manslaughter. When you went into custody, you were engaged to be married. The man that your victim killed was your former fiancée’s brother. You were close to him. You were close to other members of his family. You did not expect to see him in the same yard as you in prison. What you did was totally unplanned. You went over and attacked him and repeatedly punched and kicked him. You dragged him across a concrete area at one stage. As a result, he ended up with a fractured eye socket, a related black eye, and various grazes, bruises and areas of swelling. He had to be taken to hospital. He was treated with analgesia and discharged. I have received a victim impact statement in which he says that he has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder; that he has had trouble with anxiety, nervousness and sleeplessness; that one of his shoulders is giving ongoing problems as a result of all this; and that, instead of seeing clearly, he now sees small black spots and his eye waters and always feels tight. There is no medical report in relation to his reported symptoms, so I am not in a position to say that any of them are likely to continue for any length of time, although that victim impact statement is dated some 15 months after the assault.
Obviously this is an assault that calls for a significant prison sentence because it was a revenge attack, it resulted in serious injury, and it involved a serious breach of prison discipline. However you have already been punished by the prison authorities. That punishment included three months in, effectively, solitary confinement. You are sorry for what you did. Although you did not seem sorry initially, you have acknowledged that to behave in the way that you did was a slight on the memory of your deceased friend, and that you should not have done what you did.
There are encouraging signs that you are rehabilitating yourself. You have a terrible record, including convictions for a number of armed robberies. That is why you have been in prison now for nearly six years. The sentence that I impose will have to be a cumulative sentence – cumulative with a sequence of several other sentences. But you have taken steps to distance yourself from people with whom you used to get into trouble. At your own expense, you have been having a tattoo removed – a tattoo that indicates membership of a prison gang. You are doing that in spite of the other members of that gang being likely to be angry with you for doing that. You have been completing appropriate courses in the hope of rehabilitating yourself, and you have goals in mind in terms of working as a sporting instructor and one day helping to keep young people out of trouble, and working to prevent young people from going down the path that you have gone.
As a result of the things Mr Cangelosi has told me this afternoon, I am going to impose a lighter sentence than I had in mind, and I am going to impose the shortest possible non-parole period. But this was a serious assault, and it has to be a significant sentence.
I convict you and sentence you to 12 months’ imprisonment, cumulatively with your other sentences. You will not be eligible for parole until you have served six months of this sentence. This sentence is to be cumulative with the sentences that were imposed on 7 November 2013, 20 December 2013, 8 May 2014, 7 November 2014, and 26 August 2015.