Pedophile Stephen Leonard Mitchell made to pay for security lies

Convicted child sex predator ­Stephen Mitchell has failed in a bid to walk free from jail, with more time added behind bars because of his lies to get a top government security clearance.

Stephen Leonard Mitchell.

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Convicted child sex predator ­Stephen Leonard Mitchell hoped he would walk free from jail years earlier than his original sentence after a legal error caused the judge to impose the wrong maximum penalty.

Instead, the serial pedophile and former rock climbing coach will spend an extra year in prison for providing false information in his application for an Australian government security clearance.

Mitchell had lied in two interviews when seeking jobs with the Australian Federal Police and the Department of Home Affairs.

The 58 – year-old, who had been employed by Home Affairs at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, was given a “negative vetting two” security clearance, allowing him to access top-secret information. The department allowed him to keep working in Australia’s Indonesia embassy for at least five months before ordering him home to be arrested.

Some of Mitchell’s victims ­believe that posting may also have given him access to Indonesian children.

The AFP is now investigating a complaint of “alleged serious misconduct” over its botched investigation into the pedophile, who worked as a sports coach at police youth clubs in Canberra in the early 2000s.

On Thursday, ACT Supreme Court Acting Chief Justice David Mossop acknowledged his error in originally sentencing Mitchell to 13 years and five months, after he pleaded guilty to offences against six girls. He had mistakenly based the sentence on current penalties, not those that applied at the time of the offences between 1994 and 2008.

But Acting Chief Justice Mossop maintained his original sentence and added 19 months for Mitchell’s lies in obtaining his ­security clearance, meaning he will now serve 14 years and nine months, with a non-parole period of 10 years.

Those lies also allowed Mitchell to get clearance for a job at the Police Community Youth Club, giving him access to children and allowing him to continue offending, the judge found.

In a statement following the re-sentencing, one victim said the experience showed there were “still too many cracks in our systems, including our laws, that ­serious child sex offenders, spiders like Stephen Mitchell, are still able to crawl through”.

“That these crimes were committed in the past, or that a decision error was made, are not the key reasons achieving justice has been so difficult,” she said.

“The ACT Attorney-General has initiated a review of the ACT’s child sexual abuse laws. I hope the law is reformed so its structure, intent and application are actually clear, and that the work is done to make sure the system provides a fair path to justice.”

Despite Acting Chief Justice Mossop’s acknowledgment he made an error, ACT Attorney-General Shane Rattenbury had earlier agreed with several of Mitchell’s victims that the territory prosecuting office had made a “serious mistake” and given the victims in the case “poor advice”.

Earlier this year victims told The Australian ACT prosecutors had been specifically warned of the legal problem but were so preoccupied with the Bruce Lehrmann rape case they failed to act on the advice.

The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions acknowledged it was “a significant error that should not have happened”, but was “attributable to numerous people, and which was perpetuated through multiple steps in the process”.

In a victim impact statement read to the court on Thursday, one survivor detailed years of ­sexual abuse and a failed investigation. “My 30-year struggle is unfair – this could have been ­addressed twenty years ago,” she said. “I constantly worry that my children notice the sadness that I carry.”