R v Stone

Jackson Stone, you appear for sentence today in relation to two offences.

The first of those offences is supplying a prohibited drug not less than the large commercial quantity for that particular drug (which is methylamphetamine). That offence is sequence 1 and involves a contravention of s 25(2) of the Drug Misuse and Trafficking Act. The maximum penalty for that offence is life imprisonment and there is a standard non-parole period of 15 years imprisonment. I pause to observe that the quantity of prohibited drug involved in sequence 1 is 635.6 grams. The threshold amount for that offence is 500 grams.

The second of those offences is supplying a prohibited drug more than the indictable quantity but less than the commercial quantity for that particular drug. Again, the drug is methylamphetamine. That is sequence 4 and involves a contravention of s 25(1) of the Drug Misuse and Trafficking Act. The maximum penalty for that offence is 15 years imprisonment and there is no standard non‑parole period. Again I pause to observe that the threshold amount for that offence is 5 grams and the amount of drug involved is 189.3 grams.

When you first appeared before the Court for sentence on 17 April 2025 there was also a backup matter being sequence 3. But on that occasion that backup matter was withdrawn and dismissed.

The facts surrounding the two offences for which you are to be sentenced are mainly contained in the document entitled “Further Amended Agreed Statement of Facts”, which is exhibit C.

Those agreed facts have, to an extent, been supplemented by: admissions that you have made to the author of the sentencing assessment report and to the author of the psychologist report which was tendered on your behalf; by your affidavit made on 12 April 2025; and by your oral evidence today.

For my purposes the facts can be stated in the following way.

It would seem that before May 2023 you had come to know Dylan Shaw, most likely because you had shared time together in custody for drug offences. Precisely how you came to know Mr Shaw is not of great moment in these proceedings.

On 7 May 2023 at about 3.33pm, Mr Shaw contacted you to discuss a quantity of low quality methylamphetamine which was in Mr Shaw’s possession. Mr Shaw indicated to you that he wanted to return the methylamphetamine because of its low quality. You volunteered to Mr Shaw that you could have one of your mates exchange that methylamphetamine for Mr Shaw that night.

About 20 minutes after that first conversation (i.e. at 3.56pm) Mr Shaw indicated to you that he had a supplier for sourcing a kilogram of drugs and that you should have your mate on standby to attend to collect the substituted methylamphetamine.

About one and a half hours later (i.e. at 5.28pm) you enquired of Mr Shaw as to whether you should send your mate and Mr Shaw told you to send your mate to the supplier. Mr Shaw told you that the supplier would be providing prohibited drugs to your mate.

At about 6.07pm, Mr Shaw told you that the supplier would be providing whomever was collecting the drugs with methylamphetamine. Mr Shaw then told you that he (Mr Shaw) would collect the methylamphetamine the following morning.

I pause at this point to observe that there is no further reference to you involving any of your mates in this criminal activity.

At 9.07pm, still on 7 May, you sent Mr Shaw a text message asking him what was happening. Mr Shaw replied that the supplier was having some sort of drama; and Mr Shaw told you to attend the supplier the following morning to collect the prohibited drugs or to get a refund of cash for the previously obtained low quality methylamphetamine.

The next day (8 May 2023) at about 10.29am you made an enquiry of Mr Shaw as to the arrangement that Mr Shaw had made with his supplier. Mr Shaw responded by telling you to leave at 12 noon. You asked where you needed to go. Mr Shaw responded that he was speaking to his client and that the supplier had a kilogram of drugs waiting to be collected at 1pm. At 1.41pm, Mr Shaw asked you if you had spoken to that supplier. You replied that you were waiting for the supplier. A few minutes later Mr Shaw asked you if you were with the supplier and you effectively said yes and that he was sitting beside you. At 2.29pm Mr Shaw made an enquiry of you as to, “How we were travelling” (which I interpolate to have understood how you were going with obtaining the drugs from the supplier) to which you replied that you were on your way home.

At some point between that conversation (at 2.29pm) and 10.31pm you gave Mr Shaw the substituted methylamphetamine which you had obtained from Mr Shaw’s supplier.

At 10.31pm, and after you had given Mr Shaw the substituted methylamphetamine, he messaged you that he wanted to return that methylamphetamine and to get a refund of the cash which had been paid.

The next day (9 May 2023) at about 8.18am, Mr Shaw messaged you to organise a time in which both of you would return the first substituted methylamphetamine product to the supplier. At 9.47am, Mr Shaw messaged you telling you to bring the methylamphetamine for the return. (That agreed fact is somewhat confusing because earlier in the narrative I have set out, it was Mr Shaw who had obtained and was in possession of the methylamphetamine, but this agreed fact, para 37, suggests that somehow you were in possession. That factual ambiguity is not more clearly clarified in the agreed facts.)

In any event, there was conversation between you and Mr Shaw in which Mr Shaw indicated that he wished to try to obtain a third lot of methylamphetamine from the supplier and an arrangement was made whereby you would attend at Mr Shaw’s house at approximately 11am.

At 2.28pm on 9 May 2023, you and Mr Shaw travelled in your motor vehicle with the second lot of methylamphetamine to premises at Fairfield West. Whether or not those premises were the address of the supplier who had provided unsatisfactory quality methylamphetamine to Mr Shaw is not clear from the agreed facts. What is clear is that within that motor vehicle was a quantity of methylamphetamine.

When you and Mr Shaw entered the cul-de-sac of Shaw Place in Fairfield West, you entered the premises at number 1.

At about the time that you entered those premises, police attended in relation to a completely unrelated incident. However, it would seem that you and Mr Shaw panicked when you saw the police and you ran away from your motor vehicle to 5 Shaw Place where you tried to hide.

Your attempts to hide and evade the police were unsuccessful and you were both arrested.

Relevantly for my purposes of today, your motor vehicle was searched and there were the drugs that were Mr Shaw’s and which were intended to be substituted for a second substitute swap or a refund. Those drugs were in two bags. One bag contained the drugs which is the subject of sequence 4. The other bag was the subject of the drugs the subject of sequence 1.

The purity of the drugs in sequence 4 was 6%. The purity of the drugs in sequence 1 was 7%.

It is not irrelevant to note that on the bags which contained both quantities of drugs, only Mr Shaw’s fingerprints (and not yours) were found.

Following the discovery of those drugs in your motor vehicle, you and Mr Shaw were arrested and ultimately charged with the offences which bring you before the Court today.

At the time you committed these offences you were on parole for another drug offence H 77774748. That sentence had been imposed on 6 April 2021. The non-parole period was 12 months. The significance of that I shall turn to.

It is necessary for the Court to make a finding of the objective seriousness of each of sequence 1 and 4 for an offence of its kind.

In the context of these two offences, there are four important factors which are often taken into account in determining that objective seriousness. The first of those four factors is the quantity of the relevant drug and the extent to which it exceeds the relevant threshold amount. I have already stated those matters. The second factor is the purity of the relevant drug and, again, I have already stated that factor. The third factor is, to the extent known, the value of the drugs. There is no evidence before the Court as to the value of either set of drugs and I shall not speculate about that matter adversely to your interests. The fourth and final factor is the role played by the relevant offender. This is a matter in which your counsel and the Crown are in dispute.

As the Crown’s written submissions make clear, the Crown places you as an equal co-offender with Mr Shaw in what occurred over 7 to 9 May 2023. I do not agree that the agreed facts, as they have been placed before the Court, justifies or substantiates such a submission. You played a significantly lesser role in the events of those days than Mr Shaw. You did, in effect, no more than transport Mr Shaw on 9 May 2023, with some preliminary assistance of a very low level in the days before.

In my opinion, the objective seriousness for each of sequences 1 and 4 is towards, if not at, the actual bottom of the range for an offence of its kind.

Each offence is, of course, additionally aggravated because of the fact that you were on parole - and on parole for a drug related offence.

At the time of your offending you were in your early 20s. You come from a good family; a hard working family. Unlike many offenders who come to this court, Mr Stone, you were brought up in a loving and supportive family environment. You had some troubles at school; lots of boys do.

At the end of year 9, when academic studies were not greatly appealing to you, you made the clever decision to leave school and you went to work for your father who is a skilled carpenter. You worked for him for a number of years. By all accounts, you yourself are a skilled tradesman. You learnt a lot from your dad.

There came a point, though, when your dad became quite sick and your life started to unfold around about that time. You turned to cocaine to deal with the stress of your father’s illness and, of course, there was a motor vehicle accident involving your mother which I have not downplayed the significance of. You then got caught up in the web with which the Court is all too familiar of using illegal drugs and they took over your life. The drug that you became hooked on was cocaine, a particularly insidious drug.

Your involvement with cocaine has led you to acquire a criminal record and a serious one because in 2020 you were sentenced for supplying a prohibited drug greater than the indictable quantity but less than a commercial quantity and for dealing with the proceeds of crime. For that offending you received a term of imprisonment. It was served by a means of an intensive correction order, but it was a term of imprisonment which indicates the seriousness of the offending.

That is not your only previous criminal offending dealing with drugs because, as I have already said, at the time you committed these current offences, you were serving a term of imprisonment in which you had actually gone to gaol and you had been admitted to parole and whilst on that parole, having already served an intensive correction order, you committed these serious offences. They are serious because the maximum penalties set out by Parliament indicate how serious they are. It is very difficult, Mr Stone, to imagine an offence more serious than one that attracts life imprisonment.

You committed the offences with which I am concerned, even though you had the love and support of your parents; even though you had worked with your dad (though much reduced because of his illness and COVID); even though you had a supportive and loving relationship with the young lady who is in court today - not only a loving relationship with her but she was pregnant with your child.

Such was your addiction that your basic decency was lost.

You were spending somewhere between $300 and $1,000 a day on cocaine in the period leading up to this offending; and you became involved with Mr Shaw’s escapade for the princely sum of one day’s deal - $1,000; one day’s quantity of cocaine was your expected reward for your limited involvement in Mr Shaw’s enterprise. But it exposed you to this charge. $1,000; one day’s worth of cocaine has brought you here.

You were arrested on 9 May 2023, as I have said, and you were not granted bail until 18 August 2023. You therefore spent a little over three months of remand. In that period you missed the birth of your son.

But perhaps, Mr Stone, being arrested was probably the best thing that has happened to you because when you were admitted to bail on 18 August 2023, you took the opportunities you were given with both hands. You put yourself as an outpatient with Odyssey House and you successfully completed that. You have not touched cocaine or any illegal drugs in the over two years that you had been on bail. You have grown up. You relationship with the mother of your child remains strong; she is here today; your parents are here. You have obtained employment as a carpenter, not with your dad’s business but with someone else. Your employer has written a glowing reference about you. The senior foreman who works for that employer has also written a glowing reference about you.

You still have some underlying mental health issues which are serious ones. The psychologist who wrote the report for the court notes that you have major depressive disorder and stimulant use disorder, the latter in remission. But you do need to receive the treatment that that psychologist has recommended in order to strengthen your mental health issues to assist you to maintain this new life that you have created for yourself since you were admitted to bail. You will not be able to do it on your own. You will need the help of a psychologist as well a psychiatrist and a neurologist. That is what the psychologist has told me in the treatment plan that she has outlined. So you cannot underestimate the need for you to get help from mental health professionals. You cannot just do work; you have got to get mental health assistance. Plenty of young men in your position think they do not need it, but if you do not get the assistance this lady talks about you are setting yourself up for failure again.

I am satisfied that you are genuinely remorseful for the offending that brings you to court today. You are a completely different man to the one who committed these offences. Contrary to the pessimistic submissions of the Crown, I am satisfied that your prospects of rehabilitation are quite good. I can understand why the Crown was pessimistic, as you can too, Mr Stone, considering that you have received two previous gaol sentences for drugs. But I think what you have displayed in the last two years is extraordinary.

Nevertheless, because you are not a first offender you cannot be dealt with the leniency that is appropriate for such an offender. If you had been a first offender, I would not have been satisfied that the s 5 threshold had been crossed. But because you have previous serious convictions of drugs, even though your participation was at the low level I have described, that s 5 threshold is just crossed and in each case there will be terms of imprisonment.

I intend imposing an aggregate sentence.

In relation to sequence 1, the indicative sentence is two and a half year imprisonment minus a discount of 25% for your early plea. Therefore the indicative sentence for sequence 1 is one year, ten months.

In relation to sequence 4, except for the plea of guilty, the indicative sentence is imprisonment for 18 months. After the discount of 25% the indicative sentence is imprisonment for one year, one month.

Subject to what I shall soon say, the notional aggregate sentence therefore is imprisonment for two years and six months.

Taking into account the three months on which you were bail refused, which is exclusively referrable to these charges, the aggregate term is reduced to two years, three months.

Having considered whether your risk of reoffending is more likely to be addressed by way of full-time detention (it would not) I am satisfied the community’s safety, being the paramount consideration, will be more fully served by you serving the aggregate terms of imprisonment by means of an intensive correction order. I have had regard to s 66 of the Crimes (Sentence Procedure) Act 1999 (NSW) and the decision of the High Court in Stanley v DPP (NSW) [2023] HCA 3 in coming to that conclusion.

That intensive correction order of two years and three months starts from today.

There are two standard and mandatory conditions to any and every intensive correction order. They are: first, the offender must not commit any offence; and, secondly, he must submit to supervision by a community corrections officer.

In addition to those two mandatory conditions, there must be at least one additional condition unless there are exceptional circumstances, which is not this case.

I impose the following additional conditions.

First, you are to comply with the treatment plan outlined in the report of Ms Hawil which is item 1 in exhibit 1.

Secondly, you are to abstain from all illicit drugs or any lawful drug not prescribed for you by a medical practitioner.

Thirdly, you are to report to the officer in charge of Gosford Community Corrections before 4pm, Tuesday next, 24 June 2025.

Mr Stone, if you fail to comply with the conditions of the order, sanctions may be imposed by the State Parole Authority. Those sanctions may include a formal warning, the imposition of more stringent conditions, or it may involve the revocation of the order. If the order is revoked, you may be required to serve all or some of the period of the sentence in full-time custody.

You are now directed to attend the court registry where a copy of the order will be further explained and given to you.

I direct the registry to forward to the officer in charge of the Gosford Community Corrections Office a copy of the report of Ms Hawil.