10 Darling Downs offenders and their parole dates
Some of the Darling Downs’ convicted criminals are due to be released this year, or be eligible for parole after serving part of their sentence. We examine what happens next. SPECIAL REPORT
Police & Courts
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Each year hundreds of offenders reach a point of their custodial sentence where, as set by their sentencing magistrate or judge, they are deemed eligible for parole, or can be released under the supervision of Queensland Corrective Services.
While the length of a prison sentence is determined by the individual factors of the case, and the circumstances of the people involved, there are other elements a sentencing judge or magistrate must take into account.
According to the Penalties and Sentences Act (1992) sentencing guidelines state a prison sentence “should only be imposed as a last resort”, and that any sentence should provide conditions to help an offender be rehabilitated.
Other factors, such as an early plea of guilty and the presence of aggravating or mitigating circumstances, can also be taken into account.
University of Southern Queensland Associate Law Professor Andrew Hemming said when it came to parole, the system provided a “second bite of the cherry” regarding offenders becoming eligible for parole.
“When someone becomes eligible for parole the board goes through their processes, assessing many factors such as the offences they committed, their history, their behaviour in prison and the risk they pose to the community,” he said.
“Sentencing magistrates and judges try and do a balancing act where if they send someone to jail they have to consider public safety but also a punishment that acts as a general and personal deterrent, as well as provide the person a chance to rehabilitate.
“If the parole board release someone on parole, and they go on to reoffend, they’re going to be in double trouble for breaking parole, as they’ll have to serve out the balance of their term then whatever punishment they commit, which can become a vicious cycle.
“On the other hand, the longer someone spends in prison, statistically that increases their chance of recidivism, and from a community’s point of view we want less people committing offences and getting jailed.
“We want people who have been jailed to learn their lesson, and the question we have to ask is the parole board getting it right more than they are wrong?”
Associate Professor Hemming said when it came to the criminal justice system, members of the community needed to ask themselves what they wanted from it.
Looking at the system from a depersonalised view, Associate Professor Hemming said in an ideal world there would be no need for jails, but the next best solution was to have a system that both deterred and rehabilitated.
“Prison should be a combination of somewhere you wouldn’t want to go again but where people come out of it not wanting to reoffend,” he said.
“If prison is about locking people up and throwing away key, and we were not interested in rehabilitation at all, we’re going to have to build a lot of prisons and expect very little rehabilitation from offenders.
“The community has a vested interest in trying to make sure recidivism is as low as possible, but it might not seem like that to individual victims when they’re weighing justice by how punitive a sentence is.”
Associate Professor Hemming said if the community fixated on outcomes of individual cases the true cost of the criminal justice system is lost.
“If I sat down with outraged members of the community and had big discussion about what we want out of prison system, and explain that judges are walking a path to try and give people second chances without writing them off and thought about prison in a depersonalised way people may have a slightly different view,” he said.
“From a depersonalised view, the state government has to take a bigger picture view of rehabilitation and culture and what we want to achieve from our prison system. In that context it’s so easy to look at one case and have a knee-jerk reaction, you’d have to be Solomon to satisfy everyone with a sentence.”
Figures into the state’s prisoner population has found that more than half of offenders being released from Queensland jails go on to be resentenced for new crimes within two years.
The Queensland Corrective Services 2020-21 report also found there was a significant backlog of parole applications being processed which has had an impact on sentencing magistrates and judges who are taking the delay into account when handing down prison sentence lengths.
In addition, the report found on average it cost $207 a day to keep a prisoner behind bars – about $2 million across the state per day.
In the report, board president Michael Byrne QC said parole decisions were made in an independent and transparent way.
“Parole is not a privilege nor an entitlement. It is a method developed to prevent reoffending and plays an integral part in the criminal justice system,” he said.
“The absolute overriding consideration for the board is to ensure community safety. This requires consideration of not only whether there is an unacceptable risk to the community if the prisoner is released to parole, but also, whether the risk to the community would be greater if the prisoner does not spend a period on parole under supervision before the end of their sentence.”
Here are 10 people who are either now eligible for parole, or who have served out their custodial sentence. All decisions regarding parole are made by the Parole Board Queensland, an independent statutory authority.
Alec Joseph Jensen
The Kingsthorpe man will be eligible for parole in September after he was convicted of being in possession of two shortened firearms found in a stolen car he had previously evaded police in.
The 26-year-old pleaded guilty to a raft of close to 40 charges in Toowoomba Magistrates Court on April 22, 2022, including unlawful possession of weapons, dangerous operation of a vehicle, evading police and possessing instruments of house breaking.
The court was told that about 4.45pm on August 22, 2021, Jensen initially evaded police after checks of the vehicle he was in revealed the registrations plates did not match the vehicle.
At 1.15am the following day he again evaded police by reversing backwards out of a one-way street, mounting the gutter as police activated their lights and sirens.
Hours later at 11.45pm police attended BP Charlton after Jensen was caught on CCTV parking the vehicle and entering the service station.
While he was no longer to be seen, the court was told a search of the vehicle uncovered two firearms in the footwell of the front passenger seat, including a shortened .22 bolt action rifle with a homemade silencer attached and live round in the chamber, as well as a shortened 12 gauge shotgun. A butterfly knife, drugs and housebreaking instruments were also found in the car.
A few days later on August 30 at 10.30am police spotted Jensen in a suspected stolen vehicle driving erratically in Glenvale, overtaking vehicles into oncoming traffic at high speeds.
The court was told Jensen was arrested the following day, and had remained in custody since.
Magistrate Graham Lee sentenced Jensen to 36 months behind bars, and noting the firearm offences carried a mandatory minimum jail term of 12 months set a parole eligibility date of September 3, 2022, acknowledging 238 days of pre-sentence custody as time served.
Caige Nathaniel Grant
The convicted drug trafficker was out of jail on parole for just six weeks when he returned to dealing drugs.
Caige Nathaniel Grant had been sentenced in the Toowoomba Supreme Court to a total four-and-a-half year jail term in August 2019 after pleading guilty to trafficking dangerous drugs, the same court heard in February 2022.
After serving 15 months in pre-sentence custody, which couldn’t be declared under that sentence, he was given a sentence of three years and three months.
However, once the 27-year-old was released from jail on parole on December 16, 2019, six weeks later he was back selling ice while on parole.
Grant pleaded guilty to trafficking methamphetamine and to possessing the drug in a quantity above 2g and he was sentenced to four years in jail, but would be eligible to apply for release on parole as of May 28, 2022.
Cody Gene Bartley
The 26-year-old had been released on parole less than two weeks before he stole a Mercedes-Benz and dumped it in floodwater.
A February 26 offence was the first in a string of car thefts Bartley would go on to commit before he was arrested on March 31 and sent back to jail.
In June 2022, the father pleaded guilty in the Toowoomba Magistrates Court to four counts of unlawful use of a motor vehicle, one count of failing to provide police access to information stored electronically and four property offences.
Acting Magistrate Roger Stark gave Bartley credit for his early plea but also took into account that the offences were committed while he was on parole.
Bartley was sentenced to 15 months in jail. He will be released on parole on August 30.
Christopher Neale Roberts
A serial public masturbator was out of jail less than 24 hours when he was back in Toowoomba pulling the same stunt.
Christopher Neale Roberts was released from Woodford Correctional Centre about 10am on Friday, February 4, having served five months in custody for public masturbation and other related matters and made his way back to Toowoomba.
The following day CCTV cameras covering the car park of a private hospital in Goggs St captured the 34-year-old look straight into one of the cameras before removing his penis from his trousers and walking about the car park while masturbating.
Later, about 5am the next day, the CCTV cameras captured him walking about the car park naked while masturbating before, at one point, lying down on the ground, lifting his legs in the air while continuing to masturbate and poking himself in the bottom with his finger
In Toowoomba Magistrates Court on February 8, 2022, Roberts pleaded guilty to one count of “indecent act in any place to which the public are permitted access”
Magistrate Howard Osborne sentenced Roberts to six months in jail but ordered he be eligible to apply for release on parole as of April 7 after having served two months.
Keith John Dyball
The Goondiwindi drug dealer’s four-month operation came unstuck after he unwittingly sold ice and weapons, including two stolen rifles, to undercover police officers.
Keith John Dyball appeared in Toowoomba Supreme Court in September 2021 where he pleaded guilty to trafficking methylamphetamine to 35 different people between August 3 and December 10, 2019, as well as unlawfully supplying four weapons.
The 34-year-old was a middleman in an operation where he sourced methylamphetamine from a main supplier before selling street-level quantities of about 0.1g.
On four occasions Dyball supplied the officers with a total of 25.372g, and when one of the transactions was below the quarter ounce arranged Dyball told the undercover officer he would “sort it” before sending him an image of a man with a bleeding cut above his eye.
The court was told during Dyball’s interactions with the undercover police officers he supplied four illegal weapons, including two shortened firearms that investigations revealed were stolen.
Justice Peter Callaghan acknowledged the 654 days Dyball had spent in custody since his arrest on December 8, 2019 and sentenced Dyball to the mandatory two-and-a-half year prison sentence for the weapons offences, with a parole eligibility date of June 7, 2022. He also set a five-and-a-half year prison sentence for the drug trafficking charge, with the same parole release date.
Brady Morris Rollings
A serial tool thief who targeted tradies and deprived them of their livelihood will be released on parole in September after a police raid found an Aladdin’s cave of stolen items.
Between February and September 2021, Brady Morris Rollings committed more than 30 offences, including three charges of enter premises and commit an indictable offence and more than 20 stealing charges.
In December 2021 the 28-year-old appeared in Toowoomba Magistrates Court where he pleaded guilty to the raft of property offences.
Describing Rollings’ actions as “significant level of offending”, police estimate more than 300 items were reported stolen, with a potential value of more than $80,000.
Police investigations into a theft from the back of a ute ultimately resulted in search warrants being executed at a property in Harristown, where “close to 200” items were located throughout the house and concealed in the roof, and a second search warrant at a storage container revealed further stolen items.
Magistrate Roger Stark sentenced Rollings to two years and nine months behind bars, and set a parole release date of September 16, 2022.
Kepler Dennis Hood
A Toowoomba man will be eligible for release on parole in November 2022 after he was jailed for almost eight years for the attempted armed robbery of the Federal Hotel.
The now 37-year-old and a co-offender disguised themselves and went to the Federal Hotel armed with guns about 4.20am on May 10 in 2019 with the intention of robbing the pub, Toowoomba District Court heard in May 2021.
However, when they were disturbed by the hotel manager, Hood chased him out of the pub into the carpark where he fired a gunshot.
The hotel manager fell over and broke his leg when fleeing the intruders.
Hood and his accomplice left empty-handed and the car they had fled in was later found torched.
When arrested at a Rockville home days later, he was found to have a bag containing 33g of meth in his bum and a stolen gold ring in his jocks.
Judge Katherine McGuinness sentenced Hood to seven years and nine months in jail but ordered he be eligible to apply for release on parole as of November 27, 2022. Should he not get parole, Hood’s full-time release date will be May 7, 2029.
Peter Gordon Lister
After waiting years for justice, the two victims of Peter Gordon Lister’s historic sexual abuse were able to see him put behind bars in November 2021.
Toowoomba District Court was told the 54-year-old assaulted one victim three times between 1994 and 2000 and a second three times between 2013 and 2015 across the Darling Downs.
Lister pleaded guilty to six charges of indecent treatment of a child.
One victim was eight at the time of the assault, while the second was between seven and ten years of age.
Judge Deborah Richards jailed Lister for two and a half years. He will be eligible for parole on September 15, 2022.
Frank Beerens
A Leyburn man who was jailed for rape almost 40 years after committing sex crimes against teenage girls is now eligible for parole.
A 27-year-old Frank Beerens used his body weight to hold down a young girl and rape her in a shocking sex attack.
Frank Beerens, now aged in his 60s, later threatened her, “If you tell anyone I sh---ed you it will be your fault”.
The Leyburn man was found guilty of raping the teenage girl beside a dam at a Brisbane caravan park during the Christmas school holidays in 1984.
The court was told that at the time of the rape, Beerens was also committing sexual offences against another young girl.
He was later charged and pleaded guilty to four charges of indecent treatment of a child and was given a wholly suspended sentence at Warwick District Court in December 2021.
Judge Devereaux noted the “long effect” Beerens‘s brazen offending had on the girl, who has had to ”tell the story over and over to different counsellors without relief”.
He was sentenced to seven years‘ jail but will be eligible for parole on May 27, 2022.
Jason Charles Buckley
A sadistic serial rapist, convicted of violent attacks on women in Dalby and Toowoomba, has been released after serving 22 years behind bars.
Jason Charles Buckley, 50, was convicted in September 2003 of five counts of rape following three heinous attacks on women in 1999 and 2000.
After his arrest on April 27, 2000, Buckley pleaded guilty to the charges in District Court and was handed an indefinite prison sentence, however after an appeal that reached the High Court the sentence was set aside, with concurrent 22 year imprisonments imposed.
In a Supreme Court of Queensland hearing for Buckley’s release, Chief Justice Helen Bowskill granted Buckley’s release from custody on April 26, 2022, under the terms of a supervision order.
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