R v Barrett [2009] NSWSC 338

New South Wales Supreme Court

CITATION : R v Barrett [2009] NSWSC 338

HEARING DATE(S) : 12 March 2009, 26 March 2009

JUDGMENT DATE : 30 April 2009

JUDGMENT OF : Mathews AJ

DECISION : Imprisonment to be served by way of a non-parole period of 16 years, commencing on 17 July 2007 and expiring on 16 July 2023, with an additional term of six years, commencing on 17 July 2023 and expiring on 16 July 2029.

CATCHWORDS : CRIMINAL LAW - sentence - murder - plea of guilty - carefully planned murder perpetrated through co-offender - misguided belief that deceased posed threat to offender and children - good prospects of rehabilitation

LEGISLATION CITED : Crimes (Sentencing Procedure) Act 1999

CATEGORY : Sentence

PARTIES : Regina (Crown) Emma Barrett (Offender)

FILE NUMBER(S) : SC 12475/08

COUNSEL : H Wilson (Crown) M Ramage QC (Offender)

SOLICITORS : S Kavanagh (Solicitor for Public Prosecutions) Advance Legal (Offender)

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF NEW SOUTH WALES COMMON LAW DIVISION CRIMINAL LIST

Mathews AJ

Thursday 30 April 2009

2008/12475 R v Emma Barrett

SENTENCE 1 HER HONOUR: On 10 March 2009 Emma Barrett pleaded guilty on indictment to a charge that on 23 June 2007 she murdered David Harrison. 2 The story leading up to this killing is quite a lengthy one. It started in rural South Australia in about 2004, when the offender first met the deceased, David Harrison. He was working as a supervisor at the Kooyong Dairy, where relatives of the offender were also working. The offender was aged 18 at the time, and already had two young children. 3 The offender and the deceased commenced a relationship, which was interrupted the following year when the offender was abducted by Mr Moslan, the father of her children. He forcibly detained her at gun point, and assaulted her, which in due course led to his being convicted and imprisoned for a number of criminal offences. The deceased in the meantime had moved back to his home in Victoria. His relationship with the offender resumed in 2006 when he returned to South Australia in order to give evidence in Mr Moslan's trial. 4 Later in 2006 the offender moved to New South Wales where she lived for a time with the deceased at Curlewis, near Gunnedah. It was here that she first met her co-offender, Dean Fordham. Mr Fordham became extremely attached to the offender and her children. Probably for this reason, his relationship with the deceased was always an uneasy one, marked by considerable jealousy on both sides. 5 It was during this time at Curlewis that the offender took a document out of the deceased's trouser pocket and showed it to Mr Fordham. She told him that it was the deceased's hit list. This document was tendered in evidence on sentence. To any objective observer it is clearly a list of telephone numbers. It included the names and the telephone numbers of the offender and Mr Fordham. This document, and the emotions it engendered in both the offender and Mr Fordham, were central to the events which followed, and I shall be returning to it later. Suffice it to say here that Mr Fordham, an impressionable man of limited education and intelligence, totally accepted that this list was indeed the deceased's hit list, and that the deceased was planning to harm him. 6 It is appropriate here to say a little more about the background of the deceased. He was 24 years old when he met his death. Over the years he had undertaken a number of jobs, mainly in a rural setting. He was a licensed firearms holder, as he sometimes had to put down sick animals. The evidence indicated that he had, from time to time, held himself out as a "hit man" who did contract jobs. I accept that, if he did say this he was, in effect, big noting himself. There is no acceptable evidence whatsoever, in my view, to support the proposition that he was in fact a contract killer, or a hit man, as the offender said she believed. 7 It is clear that the deceased was extremely fond of the offender, and wanted a full-time relationship with her. This became a source of conflict between them, as she did not want one with him, but she was not prepared to tell him so directly. 8 It is unnecessary for present purposes to chart the movements of the deceased and the offender through the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007. Suffice it to say that they had something of an on and off relationship during this period, some of which was spent in Victoria and some in New South Wales. 9 In March or April of 2007 the deceased returned to Victoria, after spending some time in New South Wales with the offender. He told his mother that he needed to get a job so that he could support the offender and her two children. 10 In May 2007 the offender and her children, together with the co-offender, Mr Fordham, moved into a house rented by Mr Fordham in Maitland Road, Muswellbrook. In the meantime the deceased remained working in Victoria. In the early stages he told his mother how much he loved the offender and her children, and that he wanted to be able to support them. However, over time his attitude soured, almost certainly because the offender was not responding to his messages. He sent a number of unanswered SMS messages to the offender early in June 2007. These expressed increasing frustration at her failure to respond. Finally, on 12 June, he sent four text messages to the offender in a little over two hours. These assumed considerable significance in the sentencing, and three of them bear repetition here. At 12.10 pm the deceased sent a message saying "Your just like ya mum a using bitch fuck u I will make sure everyone knows where u are I will make life hell 4 u and ya kids r fucked"