Smiling child killer: Former tough judge calls for harsher sentences

HE WAS regarded as Queensland’s toughest judge. Now he’s challenging the judiciary to start handing down harsher sentences for horrific crimes like the killing of Tyrell Cobb.

• Refusing to explain
• Manslaughter plea

THE lawman dubbed Queensland’s toughest judge has challenged the judiciary to get tough and hand down harsher sentences after the stepfather of little Tyrell Cobb, who died from horrific injuries, walked free, causing outrage across the state.

Clive Wall QC, who retired last year after two decades on the bench, said the four-year suspended sentence given to Matthew Scown for the manslaughter of the Gold Coast four-year-old was not enough.

Responding to a story and picture in The Courier-Mail, which showed Scown laughing as he walked from court after the sentencing, Mr Wall said the penalty did not meet community expectations.

Tyrell Cobb died in 2009.

Matthew Scown yesterday

Tyrell died of horrific injuries in 2009 after Scown refused to get him medical help.

“Four years for killing a child? It’s just not enough,” Mr Wall told The Courier-Mail yesterday.

“No one would say it’s enough.”

The maximum sentence for manslaughter is life.

Mr Wall said maximum sentences for serious crimes were “perfectly adequate”.

He said many judges wanted to impose tougher sentences but felt “constrained” by the Court of Appeal.

“(They think) why do that? It’ll just be interfered with and reduced,” he said.

“(Judges) get bashed around the head when they go beyond the (sentencing) range.”

Mr Wall’s comments also follow from a landmark High Court ruling which slapped down appeal judges.

The High Court overruled Victoria’s Court of Appeal over a three-and-a-half-year sentence for a man who sexually abused his stepdaughter from the age of nine.

The ruling by Australia’s highest court sets a precedent for appeals courts across the country.

Before stepping down last year after two decades on the bench, Mr Wall – whose sentences attracted among the most appeals of any Queensland judge – regularly criticised the Court of Appeal for being too soft on criminals at the expense of victims.

Clive Wall was considered Queensland’s toughest judge.

Yesterday, he said it was “about time” appeal judges were taken to task and welcomed the High Court ruling.

He said judges had been “straitjacketed” by the Court of Appeal for too long but this week’s High Court decision meant they should now be free to impose “just” sentences more in line with community expectations.

“I’m not aware, in my 20 years as a judge, a sentencing range for an offence being increased (by the Court of Appeal),” he said.

“No one (in the community) can accept the level of sentences (being imposed today) and the Court of Appeal is to blame for that because they set the range.

“Hopefully things will now change for the better in Queensland and we’ll get some just sentencing.”

Mr Wall said prosecutors also “hardly ever” appealed lenient sentences because they feared being rejected by the Court of Appeal.

He hoped the High Court ruling might encourage an appeal against the Scown sentence.

Mr Wall said the High Court had recognised that previous sentences were not a limiting precedent and other factors, including the impacts on crime victims, needed to be taken into account.

Fresh scrutiny for laughing killer

THE State Government has ordered an urgent review into whether child killers are escaping with lenient sentences, three months after defending the laws as adequate.

The abrupt about-face follows The Courier-Mail’s front-page picture of convicted killer Matthew Scown emerging from court laughing after receiving a four-year jail term, suspended after serving almost three years, for allowing his girlfriend’s battered four-year-old son Tyrell Cobb to die without treatment.

The review is ahead of an election in which crime is set to be a central issue.

Announcing the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council investigation, Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath said the public was right to be disturbed by the image of a laughing Scown leaving court.

But Scown wasn’t laughing yesterday as he fled media outside his mother’s home. Ms D’Ath denied the case had triggered the review.

“There is a growing concern from the general public about whether sentencing for criminal offences arising from the death of a child, are meeting the community’s expectations,” she said.

“The Government believes this is an important area for consideration and that is why I will be referring an inquiry to the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council relating to sentencing arising from offences resulting in the death of a child.”

The Courier-Mail’s front page struck a chord yesterday.

Ms D’Ath’s spokeswoman said in July, when advocates last argued that child killers were escaping with lenient sentences, that Queensland had strong and robust legislative measures in place to allow the courts to “sentence offenders appropriately, including in cases where children are involved”.

Ms D’Ath also sought a briefing from the DPP on Tyrell’s case, a sign she is considering appealing the sentence. Opposition justice spokesman Ian Walker criticised the Government’s lack of real action in ordering another review.

Criminal lawyer Bill Potts backed the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, which was accused of going soft on child killers.

But he agreed it was time for sentencing of child killers to be discussed in relation to community expectations for justice to “keep pace with changing circumstances”.

Criminologist and former top cop Terry Goldsworthy said there was a perception the system was not valuing the lives of victims.

Scown, 34, was seen at his mother’s Sunshine Coast home yesterday. His family said he had been laughing at a cameraman who had fallen over a bin outside court and that he had been depicted as a monster.

Footage showed Scown grinning before the cameraman’s mishap, after which he burst into loud laughter.

The court was told Scown has a criminal history and showed “some propensity for violent offending’’.