STATE OF TASMANIA v DANIEL GREGORY WOODWARD 21 MAY 2026
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE PEARCE J
Daniel Woodward, you plead guilty to being unlawfully armed in public. I also agreed to deal with your plea of guilty to unlawfully possessing a dangerous article in a public place.
On Sunday 21 December 2025 Carols by Candlelight was being conducted at the City Park in Launceston. It is a Christmas event attended by thousands of people of all ages in which live music is performed from a stage. At around 5.30 you were seated in front of the stage but you were behaving in an erratic and disorderly way. Your behaviour led the organisers to call for the assistance of the police but before they arrived you, apparently sensing something was going on, produced a large machete shaped knife from your backpack and started brandishing it around. It was just over 30 centimetres long including the handle. The blade was about 20 centimetres long and over 6 centimetres deep at the tip. In your central location right in front of the stage there were many members of the public near you who were alarmed and frightened. One woman in particular had been seated next to you with her two children aged 5 and 8. She stood and told others that you had a knife and moved away.
Within a short time, police officers approached you. They saw you take hold of the handle of a knife from within your bag, but grabbed your hand preventing you from removing it. When you were searched you also had a multi-tool knife and a small serrated kitchen knife. Those articles are the subject of the summary charge.
You were immediately restrained and arrested and removed from the area. You have been in custody since then.
The following description of your personal circumstances comes from your counsel and from a report prepared by a clinical psychologist, Dr Georgina O’Donnell. You are a 48 year old aboriginal man. You had an alcoholic and violent father who also perpetrated serious sexual abuse against you and others. Your education is limited after having been expelled from high school. You have held some casual labouring employment over the years, but your life is dominated by your mental health issues and abuse of alcohol and illicit drugs. You are schizophrenic with co-morbid personality disorder. You have chronically abused alcohol and drugs since you were a teenager which has led to Polysubstance Abuse Disorder. You have required extensive mental health care throughout your life including inpatient psychiatric admissions and stays at the secure psychiatric hospital. You were case managed by Community Forensic Health management until 2023 but your mental health deteriorated after that management ceased. Your mental health care is thwarted by your continued substance abuse. There is a suggestion that this has led to cognitive impairment. You have limited insight into the requirement for care and you do not comply with your treatment with anti-psychotic medication. You were actively using alcohol and illicit drugs throughout 2025. You are subject to a treatment order under the Mental Health Act supervised by the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. Since your remand your psychiatric condition has improved although when you were assessed by Dr O’Donnell in February 2026 you remained psychotic. The improvement is likely attributed to stabilising your treatment and, perhaps more significantly, withdrawal from alcohol and methylamphetamine.
In the lead up to this crime you used methylamphetamine. Your paranoid psychosis led you to feel unsafe in the community and you believed that you needed these knives for your own protection. As Dr O’Donnell points out, this is not the first time that something like this has happened. In the absence of assertive mental health care in the community, your mental health deteriorates and there is an associated risk of violence and disorderly conduct.
You have an extensive criminal record beginning when you were a youth. It includes numerous convictions for disturbing the police, including by fighting, disorderly conduct, destroying property, assaulting, resisting, or abusing the police, behaving in a violent manner and other anti-social offending. On my count you have nine convictions for common assault, the most recent being for an assault committed in 2023, and other convictions for breaching a family violence order including by committing assaults. You have been ordered to serve terms of imprisonment. When suspended sentences have been imposed you have commonly breached them.
In Dr O’Donnell’s opinion your impaired mental functioning is relevant to sentence in that it impaired your ability to make rational choices and partly caused you to act as you did, and, to use her words, the Court “may wish to consider this in terms of reduction of moral culpability”. I have considered whether your moral culpability is reduced, but concluded that any reduction is marginal and of minimal weight. The material before me indicates that the overwhelming factor in the deterioration of your mental health was your use of illicit drugs and alcohol, despite your experience over a long period that use of drugs will affect your judgment and give rise to the risk of paranoid, threatening and violent behaviour. Moreover, the protection of the public from the risk you pose is now a powerful factor. Dr O’Donnell does assert that your mental health is relevant to sentence in any other way. There is nothing to suggest that prison will be more difficult for you or that it will cause a decline in your mental health. In fact, the contrary is true. The need for general deterrence is not reduced. There is a strong need for both general and specific deterrence and an even stronger need for protection of the public.
Your plea of guilty is in your favour. It avoids the need for a trial and means that the witnesses are not subjected to the additional burden of having to give evidence. You admitted what you had done and you are now sorry for it. I was asked by your counsel to consider your early return to the community, partly so that your community housing is not lost. However I regard this crime as far too serious for that. The circumstances in which this crime was committed make it an extremely serious example of being unlawfully armed in public. You are not to be sentenced for committing some other more serious crime but this is still the type of crime which shocks the public conscience and an appropriate sentencing response is required. You claim to have not intended to hurt anyone but, regardless of your intention and whether any specific threat was made, the production of the machete without more conveyed a serious threat. The inevitable result of the production and brandishing of a machete, or a machete style knife, in the centre of a crowd at a public event of that type was fear and panic. Your claim that the machete was still in its leather sheath, whilst relevant, makes little difference because those present were not likely to notice that. They thought it was a machete. You were quickly restrained but not before those in the immediate area were very frightened. The fact that you grabbed for the knife when the police arrived gave a further indication of the risk which was posed. Not only is your use of methylamphetamine not mitigating, in this case it is an aggravating factor. There was no lawful justification for you carrying around a weapon of that nature, still less to produce in the way that you did at a public event while you were affected by illicit drugs. The knives in the bag were of secondary importance but you should not have had those either.
Daniel Woodward, you are convicted on counts 1 and 2 on complaint 37616/2025. On count 2, in light of the sentence I am about to impose on the other count, I make no further order. I order that all three knives seized by the police be forfeited to the State. On count 1 you are sentenced to imprisonment for two years and three months from 21 December 2025. I order that you not be eligible for parole until you have served 18 months of that sentence.