Emergency service worker bashers not required to serve jail time, judge says
County Court judge Michael Tinney believes the mandatory sentencing laws for those convicted of assaulting emergency service workers have been widely misunderstood, which led to James Haberfield avoiding jail.
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A judge has warned legislation touted as mandatory sentencing laws, aimed at cracking down on thugs convicted of assaulting emergency service workers, doesn’t actually require him to jail offenders.
James Haberfield, 22, avoided jail despite being found guilty of bashing two paramedics while high on a cocktail of party drugs.
Haberfield had gone into a psychotic state after the four-day Rainbow Serpent festival, where he’d consumed a cocktail of drugs including ice, MDMA and ketamine.
The decision to spare him a prison term prompted outrage among the community, as well as police and ambulance unions, with Victorian Ambulance Union secretary Danny Hill angrily branding the legislation “a dud”.
— Scroll down to read paramedic Monica’s victim impact statement
It also prompted former chief magistrate Peter Lauritsen, who retired last week, to take the rare move of publicly defending the sentence.
County Court judge Michael Tinney said today the legislation introduced last year to crackdown on people who attack and injure emergency workers had been widely misunderstood.
“Whether mischievously or just misunderstood as a mandatory sentence, it isn’t a mandatory provision,” he said.
“That’s not what we’re dealing with here. It’s six months, unless there’s a special reason,” he said.
The comments came at the start of an appeal by the Director of Public Prosecutions against the sentence handed to Haberfield in September.
The DPP has submitted the magistrate who imposed the original sentence had no option but to impose a term of imprisonment.
Judge Tinney said he had been up all night getting his head around the case, and the legislation central to his sentencing task.
Haberfield has admitted launching a frenzied attack on a female paramedic, Monica, placing her in a headlock and punching her several times in the face.
He pleaded guilty to one charge of recklessly causing injury to an emergency worker, and one charge of assaulting an emergency worker.
He was sentenced in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court to an 18-month Community Corrections Order with a Mandatory Treatment and Monitoring Order.
Special reasons were found to exist, sparing him jail, because of a finding that he had an impaired mental functioning.
READ MONICA’S VICTIM IMPACT STATEMENT
But the DPP has argued because that was caused solely by self-induced intoxication, it was not open to the magistrate to impose any sentence other than a custodial sentence.
However, in a bizarre twist, forensic psychiatrist Andrew Carroll today said Haberfield’s impaired mental functioning was in fact caused by a schizophrenic condition, not solely his drug use.
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Associate Professor Carroll, who spent just over an hour with Haberfield in July, said he had updated an original court report based on new material that had come to light.
Monica, who doesn’t want her surname used, told the court she was “constantly feeling choked” and suffered ongoing “distressing flashbacks”.
“I have lost all of my independence due to this assault,” the paramedic told the court.
The appeal before Judge Michael Tinney has been adjourned until December.