STATE OF TASMANIA v INDIANNA MARY JEAN WEST 2 FEBRUARY 2024
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE PEARCE J
Indianna West, you plead guilty to perverting justice. On 7 September 2023 you appeared in the Magistrates Court in Launceston. You had been on bail for other offending, mostly dishonesty and drug offences, but you were arrested for failing to appear in court in Hobart on 6 August 2023, for other breaches of bail and for new offending including motor vehicle stealing and possessing methylamphetamine. You were worried that you would not be given bail again unless you had somewhere to live. For that reason you made up an address in Waverley and told the magistrate that was where you would be living. In fact you had never lived at that address, you had no intention of living there and your aim was to deceive the magistrate. The magistrate gave you bail to that address. By giving that false information to the court with that intention you perverted justice.
Your lie was soon discovered when the police checked the address you had given. You were arrested on 4 October 2023 and you have been in custody since then.
When you appeared in court on 7 September it was not long after you had been released after having served a short period of imprisonment for numerous failures to appear, stealing, assault and driving and drug offences committed during 2022 and early 2023. On 8 December 2023 you were sentenced by a magistrate to imprisonment for six months from 5 October 2023, three months of which was suspended, for numerous driving, dishonesty, drug and bail offences, some of which you had been on bail for. You were due for release on 5 January 2024.
You had a very difficult upbringing. You received little parental care as a child and you have effectively been homeless since you were 14 when you finished school. You have also been a user of illicit drugs, particularly methylamphetamine, and your record is consistent with that history. It is in your favour that you entered an early plea of guilty to perverting justice and it is being dealt with at the first available opportunity. Notwithstanding your difficult background and record it is to be hoped that with assistance you can still turn your life around. You are still a young person and courts give priority to the chance that you may be able to reform, but that will largely be up to you. You have already served a three month sentence. You will be subject to a community correction order as well as a suspended sentence on your release. Perverting justice is regarded as serious because it undermines the integrity of the justice system. Persons who are convicted of the crime are almost always sentenced to imprisonment, not only for punishment, but to send a message to those who might be tempted to act as you did that prison is the likely outcome. In your case, you acted as you did to obtain bail, not to escape prosecution for an offence. It is possible that you would have been given bail anyway but I doubt it. Although you were apprehended after only a month or so you took the opportunity offered by the grant of bail to commit a considerable number of other offences during that period including stealing, stealing with force, motor vehicle stealing and driving while disqualified. You have been punished separately for those offences but it aggravates the seriousness of the pervert justice charge.
You are convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for two months from 5 January 2024.