Jonathan Leslie Yates pleads out all outstanding court charges without help from lawyers

The 35-year-old told the court he preferred to represent himself than use lawyers and pleaded guilty from the prison.

A 35-year-old prisoner who has taken to representing himself in court rather than use a solicitor has at last cleared up all of his outstanding matters.

Jonathan Leslie Yates was sentenced to four years in jail after pleading guilty in Toowoomba District Court in November 2023 to carjacking a 79-year-old man who he had dragged from the man’s LandCruiser which Yates then drove across southwest Queensland while under police pursuit on May 10 and 11 2023.

The LandCruiser eventually ran out of fuel near Kogan on May 11, 2023, and Yates was arrested and taken into custody.

Jonathan Leslie Yates and the stolen LandCruiser who drove across southwest Queensland during a two-day police chase.

The 35-year-old appeared via videolink from Woodford Correctional Centre on Monday, January 15, on charges of evading police, stealing a packet of cigarettes from a Biddeston store on May 10, and stealing fuel from service stations at Jondaryan and Dulacca also on May 11 2023.

Again, Yates said he would represent himself rather than have a lawyer but told the court he had already pleaded guilty to offences committed in the May 10-11 incidents of 2023.

However, magistrate Clare Kelly explained that though he had pleaded guilty to and was sentenced to four years’ jail for the robbery and dangerous driving charges arising from that, the charges of stealing and evading police remained in the Magistrates Court jurisdiction.

Yates said he would plead guilty to those as well.

“I just kept running into dramas,” he told the court.

Jonathan Leslie Yates pictured at one of the service stations he drove away from without paying for fuel.

Noting Yates had a parole eligibility date of June 11, 2024, and that he had already spent 249 days in custody, Ms Kelly sentenced him to the minimum mandatory period of 50 days in jail for the evade police offence, which had already been served, and disqualified him from holding or obtaining a driver’s licence for the mandatory two years on that offence.

Ms Kelly told Yates that her sentence would not impact on the District Court sentence or his parole eligibility date, explaining that all of his charges before the court had now been disposed of.

“Thank-you, Your Honour,” the prisoner replied.