Terrorism plots: court adds years to 'lenient' sentences for teenagers

Two Victorian teenagers who planned separate terror attacks in Melbourne in 2015 will spend an extra four years in jail after the Victorian court of appeal ruled their original sentences had been manifestly inadequate.

The appeals are at the centre of a building political controversy concerning the fate of three federal ministers, who declared the court an “ideological experiment” after reading media reports of some of the appeal hearings earlier this month and have since been called upon to explain themselves to avoid potential charges of contempt of court.

Ministers Greg Hunt and Alan Tudge and assistant minister Michael Sukkar, who all criticised the court for not handing down tougher sentences on people convicted of terrorism offences, apologised to the court in a separate hearing later on Friday.

Last week, the chief justice, Marilyn Warren, made a public statement saying the outcome of the appeals would not be affected by political pressure, intended or otherwise, by federal government ministers.

In a joint hearing at the court of appeal on Friday morning, Sevdet Besim, a 20-year-old Hallam man who pleaded guilty to planning to run down and behead a police officer during the 2015 Anzac Day commemorations, was re-sentenced to 14 years’ jail, with a non-parole period of 10 years and six months.

The Commonwealth Director of public Prosecutions (CDPP) launched an appeal against his original sentence of 10 years’ jail, with a non-parole period of seven-and-a-half years, a month after it was handed down in September 2016.

He has been in jail since his arrest on in April 2015, just days before the planned terror attack.

If he had not pleaded guilty, Warren said, Besim would have been sentenced to 19 years’ jail with a non-parole period of 12 years. His crime of preparing for, or planning, a terrorist attack carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

The court also allowed the CDPP’s appeal against the sentence of a 19-year-old Melbourne man known as MHK, who plotted to use homemade bombs in an attack in Melbourne’s central business district, on a train, or at a police station on Mother’s Day 2015.

MHK was sentenced in December to seven years’ jail with a non-parole period of five years and three months, a sentence trial judge Lex Lasry said was due to MHK’s youth and a need not to impose a crushing sentence on a child with an otherwise clean criminal record.

His revised sentence is 11 years’ imprisonment with a non-parole period of eight years and three months.

If MHK had not pleaded guilty, Warren said, his new sentence would have been 16 years’ imprisonment with a non-parole period of 12 years.

MHK has been held in a youth detention centre since his arrest as a 17-year-old in May 2015.

In a lengthy judgment on MHK’s case, Warren and two other judges, Stephen Kaye and Mark Weinberg, wrote that while sentences for terrorism in Australia had on occasion been “significantly lower”, the landscape had changed.

“Having regard to the scourge of modern terrorism, and the development of more recent sentencing principles in the is area, they seem to us to have been unduly lenient,” the judgment said. “No such sentences would have bee imposed today.”

It said the level of planning and preparation undertaken by MHK, who had been talking online to a senior Islamic State figure in the United Kingdom and had acquired a large quantity of screws and shrapnel to use in a homemade bomb, meant that his moral culpability, even having regard to his youth, “must be assessed as being at a very high level”.

In a separate written ruling, the judges said that Besim’s decision to target a police officer in a public place during a parade, and his “willingness to kill other innocent civilians if at all possible,” made it an “extremely serious” offence.

“His cold-blooded and chilling discussions with [another accused] which the sentencing judge rightly characterised throughout the plea as reflecting ‘putrid’ behaviour, called for severe punishment, and a strongly deterrent sentence.”