1 SULLY J: On 30 October 1998 in the District Court at Tamworth Mr Ross David Crowe, the present applicant for leave to appeal against sentence, stood for sentence before his Honour Judge Solomon. The applicant had been found guilty after a substantial trial by jury of two very serious criminal offences: one of them an aggravated indecent assault; and the other an aggravated act of sexual intercourse without consent. The first of those offences contravenes s 61M(1) of the Crimes Act 1900 and attracts a statutory maximum penalty of imprisonment for seven years. The other offence contravenes s 61J(1) of the same Act and attracts a statutory maximum penalty of penal servitude for 20 years.
2 The learned sentencing Judge imposed in respect of the two offences cumulative sentences. As to the contravention of s 61M(1) his Honour sentenced the applicant to imprisonment for a period of two years and six months as a minimum term with an accompanying additional term of 12 months. For the contravention of s 61J(1) his Honour sentenced the applicant to penal servitude for eight years and nine months to comprise a minimum term of six years and six months and an additional term of two years and three months. As I have said, his Honour made the sentences cumulative, so that the practical effect of the sentences was to impose a total liability to, variously, penal servitude and imprisonment totalling 11 and a quarter years, nine of them actually to be served, and the remaining two and a quarter years to be a minimum term applicable to the overall position created by the accumulated sentences.
3 The offences in question were beyond any doubt, and simply in their own particular terms without any other aggravating circumstances, extremely serious offences. They were committed against a young girl to whom the applicant stood in a position of, in effect, familial trust. The learned sentencing Judge was, in my respectful view, entirely correct to treat the offences as on their own intrinsic facts very serious offences.
4 In February of 1991 the applicant had been dealt with by a Judge of this Court in the Narrabri Supreme Court in connection with two offences involving significant sexual impropriety between him and the same victim. One of the matters then charged against him was sexual intercourse with a child under the age of ten years, an extremely serious offence. The other matter then charged against him was that of indecent assault upon a child under 16 years by a person then in authority over the child. That too is well recognised as an extremely serious offence.
5 The objective facts of those matters are set out on page three of the remarks on sentence. I do not now repeat them in detail. That is because, as I apprehend, there are present in Court persons who are connected with the victim and I do not think that any purpose would be served by recounting yet again in open Court the disgusting details of the offences with which the Court was dealing in 1991. What was specifically said by his Honour Judge Solomon at page three of those remarks on sentence is available for proper public recourse and will speak for itself as to the gravity of the offences that were in issue in 1991.
6 In respect of each of those matters this Court gave the applicant the benefit on each count of a recognisance, self in the sum of $1,000 to be of good behaviour for five years; that is to say until and including 17 February 1996. On its face this is an extremely lenient sentence; and it is, I think, properly to be inferred that the Judge who made the recognisances available to the applicant did so upon the basis of what must have been an extraordinarily persuasive subjective case embodying, as I think common sense would suggest, strong assurances on the part of the applicant there would not be in the future any repetition of the offences in question at all; and certainty not a repetition in connection with the same victim.
7 Of the two matters in relation to which his Honour Judge Solomon sentenced the applicant, the first of them, that is to say the s 61M(1) matter, was an offence committed at some unspecified time between 1 January 1994 and 31 December 1994. It was clearly an offence committed during the currency of the recognisances to which I have earlier referred. It is trite, but perhaps worthwhile to make the point for proper emphasis nonetheless, that such re-offending is the more egregious because it involves not only a discrete offence, but a discrete offence in the teeth of the assurances which may reasonably be supposed to have been given so as to have attracted the grant of the recognisances in the first place.
8 The second of the matters for which the applicant was sentenced by his Honour Judge Solomon, that is to say the s 61J(1) matter, occurred on or about 30 August 1997; that is to say, it occurred at a time after the expiration of the recognisances of which I have been speaking. Nonetheless, that it occurred at all shows, to say the very least, a fairly loose approach on the part of the applicant to the considerable leniency represented by the recognisances granted to him in 1991.
9 The learned sentencing Judge in the present case took account of the fact that the applicant had pleaded not guilty, as of course the applicant was perfectly entitled to do, thereby entailing the inescapable calling by the Crown of the victim in question. It is well recognised by sentencing Courts, and certainly well recognised by this Court, that the exposure of a young victim to the exigencies of a hotly contested trial at first instance involves in the nature of things a degree of personal stress and distress which are of deep concern to the Courts in connection with the effects which they maybe supposed to have upon the future personal development and personal adjustment and, indeed, personal recovery, of such a young victim from her experience at the hands of the particular offender. It goes without saying, and his Honour Judge Solomon clearly recognised, that the applicant was not liable to be punished the more seriously simply for having exercised his undoubted right to defend the charges brought against him. His Honour recognised as well, however, and correctly, that the applicant was not entitled to the discount, and it is sometimes a generous discount, - which the Court concedes to an offender who acknowledges properly his or her guilt of offences charged. That is especially so in cases that involve gross sexual impropriety. For the reasons to which I earlier adverted, it is always the anxious concern of the Courts to avoid exposing young victims to the giving of evidence in a hotly contested trial where everything they have said by way of complaint is relied over in meticulous detail, and on the basis of suggestions, of the kind that were put forward quite plainly in the present case, that the complaints are essentially a concoction.
10 That situation has in the present matter an additional dimension that arises by reason of the fact that the applicant, having been found guilty by the jury as charged on both counts in the indictment, at his subsequent sentencing proceedings did in fact acknowledge that the allegations upon which he had gone to trial had been in fact true. He coupled with that an apology to the victim and the members of her family. Judge Solomon appears, it seems to me, to have taken proper account of all those matters.
11 There were, as of course there always are, subjective matters to the particular offender. It is sufficient to say that they were taken, as far as I can see from a reading of the remarks on sentence, adequately into consideration.
12 At page four of the remarks on sentence the learned sentencing Judge summed-up the overall perception that his Honour had about this matter as follows:
"The prisoner is a sexual predator who has preyed over the years on a young child. He acted as a sexual vulture in the family and had been in 1990. He is a recidivist pedophile of the worst possible type, selfishly abusing a young child for his own sexual gratification. This community will not tolerate actions which cause such hurt and distress to an innocent victim."