By CAM LUCADOU-WELLS
A CRANBOURNE man has been jailed for repeated intervention order breaches – including angrily throwing fruit inside the family home.
Magistrate Barry Schultz told the 47-year-old on 23 May he had little sentencing options but to jail him after the accused refused a community corrections order due to chronic back pain.
“I can understand chronic pain affects one’s mental health, well-being and impacts on relationships. I’m sympathetic to him,” Mr Schultz said.
“However, these are contraventions of orders and every attempt has been made to assist him rehabilitate himself.
“Really, there’s only one alternative left to me, isn’t there?”
The man had breached an exclusion from the family house several times in May and hurled fruit during an argument with his wife over shopping, Dandenong Magistrates’ Court was told.
The man told police he didn’t intend to strike the wife with the fruit, but just to cause fear. He allegedly called her a “f***ing idiot”, “moron” and “bitch”.
On 12 May, the wife took refuge in Cranbourne McDonalds’, and used the store’s phone to call for help from police.
The man was arrested at the home, made full admissions and was remanded in custody for the next 11 days.
In April, he had been placed on a community corrections order over two counts of unlawful assault against the wife as well as possessing cannabis and a prohibited weapon.
But he’d breached the order by not attending appointments and committing the further offences, the court was told.
“It may sound aggressive, but he won’t be able to comply with (another) CCO,” defence lawyer Adam Maloney said – citing the man’s chronic back pain due to a workplace injury, financial woes and lack of transport.
“He’s concerned that he’s setting himself up to fail.”
The man’s wife pleaded to the court to vary the intervention order to allow him back.
“He’s a good man,” she said, adding that their 20-year-marriage had recently gone sour due to their deep financial struggles and her husband’s continuing four-year battle for WorkCover compensation.
They were barely subsisting on Centrelink payments in the meantime.
They had sold up two investment properties and a car, spent the liquid assets and gone into arrears at their matrimonial home, the court was told.
“I want him to come home legally,” the wife said. “I wanted him to work out our problems without him breaking the law.
“He did nothing wrong.”
The man told the court he’d returned because he had nowhere else to go.
He complained of his neck “just about broken” from sleeping on a concrete floor, and of snapped tendons in his fingers going untreated while in custody.
“I’m in a lot of pain … I’ve been watching us lose everything we’ve worked hard for.”
Mr Schultz cancelled the CCO and jailed the man for 30 days – a sentence that was “as low as I can go”.
He also varied the intervention order to allow the man to live at the family home after he was released from jail.
“Courts don’t want to impose ourselves in family homes.
“You have serious issues, but you’ve got to man up and be above all that.”
