Posted
The Queensland man who molested a seven-year-old girl after luring her away from her mother in Kmart will no longer be eligible for parole next year, after the state’s Attorney-General won an appeal.
Key points:
- Sterling Free took a girl from a shopping centre and sexually abused her before dropping her back to the centre in 2018
- Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath filed an appeal on Free’s early parole eligibility date after he was sentenced last year
- The Court of Appeal has ruled there should be no recommendation for early parole
Father-of-two Sterling Mervyn Free was originally allowed to make a bid for release in August 2021, but the Court of Appeal today ruled there should be no recommendation for early parole.
The decision means he will become eligible after serving half of his eight-year jail term, rather than one-third.
Free last year admitted to taking the girl from Kmart at Westfield North Lakes in December 2018, driving her to an isolated spot about 30 minutes away and sexually abusing her, before dropping her back to the centre almost 90 minutes later.
He pleaded guilty in the District Court to taking a child for immoral purposes, deprivation of liberty, and indecent treatment of a child under 12, and was handed an eight-year sentence, with parole eligibility in August 2021.
He had already served 306 days in custody.
Photo:
Sterling Free, 26, pleaded guilty in 2019 to kidnapping and indecently treating a child under 12.
In sentencing him, Judge Julie Dick described Free’s crimes as “every parent’s nightmare” and said the CCTV footage showing him leading the child out of the store was “chilling,” “opportunistic” and “predatory”.
Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath later filed an appeal, arguing the sentence was “manifestly inadequate” due to the early parole eligibility date.
She did not contest the head sentence of eight years, but said the judge should have either declared the kidnapping a serious violent offence, which would require Free to serve 80 per cent, or not fixed a parole eligibility date at all.
In a 24-page judgement, the Court of Appeal judges said the “sentence that is just in all the circumstances is one of eight years imprisonment, with no serious violent offence declaration and no early recommendation for parole”.
“In a case of this kind, the mitigating effect of a guilty plea and cooperation, whilst still deserving of tangible recognition, must yield to other factors, such as denunciation and community protection,” the court said.
They said it wasn’t known how Free would respond to treatment programs behind bars.
Photo:
The girl was taken from a Kmart at Westfield North Lakes shopping centre. (ABC News: Laura Gartry)
“Community protection is not achieved only by actual incarceration, it is also achieved by the oversight of the Parole Board, before a person may be released on parole; and by supervision of the person, on parole, if they are released, for the remainder of their sentence, whilst they make the adjustment from custody and back into the community,” the court said.
“Allowing the possibility of a date for eligibility for parole at an earlier stage (than 80 per cent) has two potential benefits: first, to provide the prisoner a basis for hope and, in turn, an incentive for rehabilitation; and, in appropriate cases, to enable a longer period of conditional supervision, outside of the custodial environment, which may provide greater community protection in the long term.”
When asked at a media conference about the appeal, Ms D’Ath said she wanted to see the details of the judgement first.
“We chose to appeal for a good reason,” she said.
“There’s the head sentence but it’s also the parole eligibility that particularly I have been appealing with a number of cases in recent times, so any decision to increase that timeframe that a person has to serve, and particularly in this case, I welcome.”
Topics:
courts-and-trials,
law-crime-and-justice,
sexual-offences,
mango-hill-4509,
qld,
australia