Patrick Michael Mills: Convicted murderer to spend more time in jail
Patrick Michael Mills has spent most of his adult life in jail after shooting a man dead during an armed robbery and sexually touching two teens - he’s now in for another stint after trying to remove his ankle bracelet with a fork.
The Blue Mountains News
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A man with convictions for murder and indecent assault has kicked a prison door after learning his fate on further charges.
Mills was 22 when he shot 62-year-old Bernard Morton to death during an armed robbery at a bottle shop on the Central Coast in 1993, a crime that saw him spend 22 years in jail.
Shortly after his release in 2016, he was charged with two counts of indecent assault, now known as sexual touching, for groping two teenage girls at a shopping centre.
According to court documents, Mills reported to police that there was “so much ‘young arse’ around the shopping centre that all he wanted to do was to be able to feel it”.
Justice Stephen Rothman ordered Mills onto a three-year extended supervision order in September, 2017, with conditions that he would wear a tracking ankle bracelet, not leave the state of NSW, and would alert authorities to his planned movements each week.
Mills was arrested just five days later in Queensland.
He was again released from prison on September 13 last year to live with his mother at an address in Parramatta, and was later moved to a temporary address in Minchinbury.
On September 23, Mills caught a bus to Mt Druitt railway station at 5.19am, and was detected travelling west on a train towards Penrith at 5.49am.
He was captured on CCTV attempting to break his tracking ankle bracelet using a metal fork, and was arrested at Katoomba railway station at 7.22am.
Police found a handwritten note with a train timetable to get from Katoomba to “BH” and said Mills’s ankle bracelet was noticeably damaged.
In Katoomba Local Court, the prosecutor said Mills’s repeat patterns of offending increased the seriousness of the offence.
“The offences he has pleaded guilty to undermine the ability of the court to effect supervision, and for that reason are objectively serious,” he said.
He also said Mills’s similar charge in 2017 came because he was “tired of being told what to do, and thought he was being persecuted”.
Mills’ lawyer asked Magistrate Leanne Robinson to find special circumstances, saying his time in jail would be “particularly onerous” given his previous charges and that he had been assaulted on previous occasions in jail.
Magistrate Robinson sentenced Mills to a jail sentence of two years and three months with a non-parole period of one year and six months.
Mills reacted negatively to his sentence, saying “you’ve got to be kidding me, keeping me in jail for this s***”, before kicking the door to his AVL suite.
He will be eligible for parole on March 23, 2021.