One-punch laws: Has tougher legislation curbed coward-punch epidemic?

ONE-PUNCH victims Thomas Kelly, Daniel Christie and Michael McEwen sparked a legal revolution with laws enacted to end the scourge of coward punches in NSW a year ago.

THEY have become household names for the saddest of reasons.

Thomas Kelly and Daniel Christie, both just 18, the victims of drunken coward-punch violence in Kings Cross.

And Michael McEwen, 23, who survived the punch that almost killed him at Bondi but only after lifesaving surgeons removed a chunk of his skull and kept it in a freezer until it could be replaced.

Kings Cross coward punch victim Michael McEwen. Picture: 60 Minutes

Alan Canning read about the young men as they fought for their lives in hospital and as their parents prayed and grieved.

“You think how sorry you are and their poor parents and the other people left behind but you never think it’s going to happen to you,” he says.

But then he got the phone call every family dreads.

His son Glenn Canning, 45, was dead after being punched — not at the hands of a drunken stranger while out drinking or clubbing but at work.

Glenn was at the controls of the forklift truck he was operating on the Crawfords Freightlines site at Sandgate in Newcastle in August last year.

“I was in the car and I pulled over to take the call. You never expect it. It is quite devastating,” Mr Canning says.

His son’s alleged attacker, work colleague Geoffrey Strong, 44, has become one of the seven people to be charged under the state’s new coward-punch laws.

Like the dramatic changes to drinking laws, including 1.30am lockouts that have slashed alcohol-fuelled violence in Kings Cross and the CBD, the one-punch laws were introduced after the brutal wave of cowardly punch attacks.

Becoming law in January 2014, they were designed as deterrents, to stop defendants walking away with not guilty verdicts to murder or manslaughter and to stop judges from giving them little more than a slap on the wrist.

Strong has been charged under the new Section 25A of the Crimes Act which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years if he is convicted of causing the death of Glenn by “intentionally hitting the other person with any part of the person’s body or with an object held by the person”.

In trials for murder (maximum life sentence) or manslaughter (maximum penalty 25 years’ jail), if the jury does not find those charges proven beyond reasonable doubt, they can return an alternative verdict under the new Section 25.

Plus, if the offender is drunk, under Section 25, there is a maximum penalty of 25 years and a mandatory minimum non-parole term of eight years.

The judges and most of the legal fraternity hate mandatory sentences. They hate being told what to do, they say that every case is different and, they say, evidence shows that mandatory minimum sentences may increase not-guilty pleas.

The coward-punch laws have also been criticised for making alcohol an aggravating factor.

“How could it ever be acceptable to argue an offender who is not intoxicated by alcohol or drugs should be considered less criminally culpable than one who is,” District Court judge Paul Conlon said last year.

The former Director of Public Prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery QC has questioned how the decisions would be made to charge defendants with the new laws and not manslaughter or other charges.

“All of this may pose difficult problems for decision makers to address and courts to adjudicate on,” he said as part of the debate over the laws.

“Those problems are compounded by the possible consequences of their decisions i.e. the penalties that an offender will be liable to if convicted.”

But commentators have questioned whether the new laws would have been brought in had the judge who jailed Thomas Kelly’s attacker, Kieren Loveridge, given him a reasonable sentence.

His original sentence of seven years and two months with a non-parole period of just five years and two months sparked community outrage and then-Premier Barry O’Farrell answered it with the new tougher laws.

Loveridge’s sentence was doubled to 13 years and eight months with a non-parole period of 10 years and two months by the Court of Criminal Appeal.

Loveridge, 21, who had been drinking heavily for five hours, killed Thomas with an unprovoked punch as Thomas walked along Victoria St in Kings Cross just after 10pm on July 7 2012. Then he tried to use the fact that he was drunk as a mitigating factor. An excuse.

Daniel Christie’s killer Shaun McNeil, 27, had a shocking criminal record but had never seen the inside of a jail cell.

He had been convicted of four assaults, at least two of them on women, breaching two apprehended domestic violence orders, breaching a good behaviour bond through excessive drinking, possessing a knife and possessing drugs.

The maximum penalty for common assault and breaching an AVO is two years behind bars.

But the closest the judiciary came to getting tough on the musclebound labourer was a six-month suspended prison sentence imposed in 2009 for a Valentine’s Day assault and breaching a domestic AVO.

For the punch that killed Daniel on New Year’s Eve 2013, McNeil was given a 10-year jail sentence with a non-parole term of seven-and-a-half years after he was found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter.

Daniel’s father, Michael Christie, had wept when he told the Supreme Court about turning off his son’s life support 11 days after the one-punch attack.

He said he and Daniel’s brother John were haunted by the “gagging, spluttering and death rattles” as Daniel died when the ventilator was removed in the intensive care unit at St Vincent’s Hospital.

On the frontline of the city’s drunken violence night after night, the doctors and nurses at St Vincent’s were used to fighting to save the life of at least one person in the ICU every month who had been the victim of drunken violence.

Since the lockout laws were introduced in February 2014, there have been only three such patients and none have died, says the hospital’s spokesman David Faktor.

One was Irish tourist Patrick Lyttle, 31, who spent a week in a coma last year after being punched by his brother Barry Lyttle, 33. Barry pleaded guilty to recklessly causing grievous bodily harm and was given a 13-month suspended sentence.

Faktor says that just as important as the lockout laws are the forced closure of bottle shops across the state at 10pm.

“On Friday and Saturday nights we were treating scores of people with alcohol-related injuries and while we are still seeing some, it is not anything like on the same scale,” he says.

He added that while cynics said the problem would just be pushed into surrounding suburbs, other hospitals like Royal Prince Alfred in Camperdown had not reported any significant increase in alcohol-related harm.

Faktor says the lockout laws have had a more immediate effect than the one-punch laws.

Michael McEwen’s sister, Claudia McEwen, 21, is not a supporter of any of the new laws, believing responsibility and education are the answer.

“When someone is throwing a punch, they are not thinking ‘I’m going to go to jail for a long time for this’,” she says. “People are not thinking rationally.”

With her brother recovering, she launched the Wake Up Foundation to focus on education and talks to schoolchildren about staying safe on a night out, focusing on drinking, drugs and violence.

Alan Canning said his son Glenn, who had two daughters and two grandchildren, dreamt of buying a block of land, building a house, “getting himself away from it all” and settling down with his family.

“He will never manage to do that,” he says. “This garbage they talk about closure, what closure? There’s no such thing as closure.”

It is not about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s about there being no wrong place.