State of New South Wales v Vinh Le

Judgment 1On 2 February 2012 I granted an application by the plaintiff, the State of New South Wales, for an extended supervision order, pursuant to s 9 of the Crimes (Serious Sex Offenders) Act 2006, against the defendant, Vinh Le. The order was for a period of 3 years from 5.00pm on 2 February 2012 and, pursuant to s 11 of the Act, I directed the defendant to comply with a number of conditions set out in a schedule of that same date. I undertook to give reasons for that decision. These are those reasons. 2On 3 November 2011 I made an interim extended supervision order, for which I gave short reasons that day. In those reasons I sketched briefly the State's case. It is not necessary to repeat what I said on that occasion but, of course, it is necessary to expand upon it and to set out my findings in the light of psychiatric evidence which I received subsequently. 3The defendant is 57 years old. He is of Vietnamese origin, and migrated to Australia in 1984 when he was 29. There is no need to refer to his background in Vietnam or in this country, except to note that he has an older sister who lives in Melbourne, that he married and moved to Brisbane, the union producing a son who is now an adult, that the marriage failed and that he moved to Sydney in 1988, leaving his wife and son in Brisbane. 4In 1995 he met the woman who, along with her children, was to be the victim of the sexual offences of the following year. They embarked upon a sexual relationship and early in 1996, with the children, moved into a unit at Lakemba. It was there that the offences, committed over a period of some 6 months, took place. His partner's children were a daughter, aged 12, and a son, aged 4. 5In August 1998, he was found guilty at a trial in the District Court of 6 counts of sexual assault and 4 of common assault. Of the assault counts two were offences of striking the children, which do not appear to have sexual overtones. However, the same cannot be said of the other two, perpetrated against the mother. On the first occasion it was because she refused to believe his unfounded claim that her daughter was having a sexual relationship with a man. On the second occasion it was the result of his belief, again unfounded, that the mother herself had engaged in some sort of sexual activity with her daughter. These assaults were part of a wider pattern of violence, or the threat of it, by which he gained control over her. In her remarks on sentence the trial judge, Tupman DCJ, described the relationship as it developed as "abusive." 6The sexual offences of which the defendant was found guilty were the following: