The Supreme Court has today published the sentencing of Rian Minnis.

29 year old Minnis, a father of three including a 16 year old, has been found guilty of invading his neighbour’s house, with a friend and baseball bat, at 4am and bludgeoning that sleeping neighbour and his partner causing horrific injuries.

At the time Rian was on conditional liberty for being in unlawful possession of stolen property.

The cause of this Clockwork Orange-esque rampage was a dispute over a pair of shoes.

The judge described Rian’s circumstances thusly:

At the time of the offences, the offender was at a very low point in his life. He was, in effect, homeless. He was on a disability support pension. He had debts of about $10,000. About $3,000 of those debts related to traffic fines.

So what to do with him? It’s rather clever and we’ve seen a bit of this in the recently arrived Chief Justice’s tenure. It’s all possible because he’s been found guilty of multiple crimes.

He’s going to the pokey until June 2016. After that he won’t be costing the taxpayer and will have a chance to rebuild his life, but he’ll still be on periodic detention until September 2017.

He’ll then be on a good behaviour order, with a suspended sentence hanging over his head for two and a half years, effectively into 2020.

Hopefully a lesson will be learned and a life will be rebuilt with a real deterrent hanging over his head.

One wonders if the law doesn’t need changing so these sorts of sentences can be applied in cases where a single serious crime has been committed?