STATE OF TASMANIA v KURT STANLEY JAMES 3 APRIL 2020
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE PEARCE J
Kurt James, you plead guilty to assault. On 20 March 2017 the complainant, Justin Goss, was at a service station at George Town. He heard and saw you yelling and swearing at a female with a pram on the footpath nearby. The woman was your partner. She was crying and backing away from you. Mr Goss did not know you but became concerned for the woman’s safety and welfare. He approached you and asked you to stop. You responded by asking him to fight. He refused and returned to his car. As he drove away, you threw something which struck his van. When he stopped to speak with you, you kicked part of a picket off a fence, ran at him and, from a distance of about a metre, threw it at him. It struck the back of his head, and caused a cut which bled heavily. You then ran off.
Mr Goss attended the Launceston General Hospital. Apart from the cut he had a headache and blurred vision. The cut was cleaned and required three stitches to close.
You were identified by a witness and spoken to by the police on the following day. You admitted being in a “fight” at the service station, but declined the opportunity to be interviewed. You were not located and arrested until 19 August 2017. When interviewed then, you claimed that you threw the picket from 5 metres away in defence of yourself when the complainant and two other males, one of whom had a knife, aggressively confronted you. You now accept your claims were not true.
Mr Goss has not given a victim impact statement. That does not mean that there is no impact, but I will sentence you on the basis that the assault caused no lasting or serious physical injury or psychological effect.
You are now aged 37. As a child you were subject to abuse and neglect. As a result of terrible violence perpetrated by your mother’s partner, you were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by age 10. By the time you were 11 you had stopped school and were living on the streets. You have lived an itinerant lifestyle ever since. For most of your life you have had a very serious problem with addiction to drugs. Your childhood experiences have, it seems, permanently damaged your ability to react in a calm and rational way to stressful situations, and instead you resort to violence. You have a long record for offences of dishonesty and violence, as well as for other offending including involving illicit drugs, traffic, breaches of bail and injuring or destroying property. You have been to prison many times. I will mention only the most serious and relevant convictions. In October 2008 you were sentenced by a magistrate to imprisonment for 15 months, six months of which was suspended, for a large number of summary offences including assaulting a police officer and common assault. In 2010 you were sentenced to imprisonment for offences including two counts of common assault. In 2011 you were sentenced to imprisonment for four years for an act intended to cause bodily harm after you had badly injured a man by shooting him twice with a shotgun after a street dispute. While you were an inmate of Risdon Prison on 22 September 2010 you were party to a joint assault of a number of prison officers by depriving them of their liberty and threatening to strike them. You were sentenced to a cumulative term of six months. On 10 November 2017 you were sentenced to imprisonment for three years and six months for serious violence against your then partner committed in November and December 2016. You pleaded guilty to wounding and two counts of assault. You stabbed her in the thigh with a screwdriver and then, on separate occasions, were violent to her in various ways including by punching her and choking her with a belt. A non-parole period of two years was imposed. You were released on parole in November 2019 but taken back into custody. You are still serving that sentence and your earliest release date is 14 October 2020. The 2017 convictions were after the crime I am now dealing with, and so are not prior convictions for sentencing purposes, but are relevant to my assessment of the prospects for your rehabilitation and the risk that you pose. It is aggravating that you committed the crime for which you are now to be sentenced while you were on bail. That sentence is also relevant to totality because it was for crimes committed at around the same time, and you have spent much of the time in prison since then. Had you been sentenced at the same time I think it would have added to the sentence because of the additional criminality involved, but there also would have been some overlap.
Despite all of the difficulties that you have encountered in your life, you can read and write and, when not in prison, you have managed to hold down a job for extended periods. Through your counsel I was informed that you have been diagnosed with cancer, but you are being treated in prison and you expect to make a full recovery. It is of course of concern that you are unwell, but I do not see that it should affect the sentence I should impose. It is in your favour that you have pleaded guilty.
Very fortunately, your assault of Mr Goss did not result in even more serious injury, but the risk that it could have is obvious, and it was not doubt very disturbing for him. If he had been more seriously injured, a longer sentence would have been required. It was however, an assault in a public place, with others present, using a weapon, resulting from a situation which you created by your aggressive conduct. It is another example of you resorting to senseless violence.
Kurt James, you are convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for eight months. I order that four months of that term is to be served concurrently with the sentence you are presently serving, and the balance is to be cumulative. The result is, Mr James, that subject to grant of remissions, you will serve an additional four months.