Media Release
23 June 2011
A research report released today by the Sentencing Advisory Council will provide Victorian courts and the public with more detailed data on sentencing trends than have been available to date.
The Aggravated Burglary Current Sentencing Practices report provides in-depth analysis for the offence of aggravated burglary. The analysis covers sentences that were handed down in the County Court of Victoria between July 2008 and June 2009. This report is the first of a series that analyses the sentencing remarks made by judges when imposing sentences in the Supreme and County Courts.
Professor Arie Freiberg, Chair of the Sentencing Advisory Council said, 'We wanted to start this series by looking at aggravated burglary because it is an offence that occurs in a very wide variety of forms. It is also one of the offences that the Director of Public Prosecutions has recently challenged in regard to current sentencing practices.
'The Sentencing Advisory Council has been producing data on sentencing trends in the form of our Sentencing Snapshots since 2005. While these go some of the way to assisting the Courts, when you have an offence such as aggravated burglary we regarded it as important to provide the courts with more detailed information and analysis.'
The Sentencing Advisory Council collected the data by reading and coding sentencing remarks for 178 cases that involved at least one charge of aggravated burglary.
The Council examined the common features and key differences between the 178 cases and found six distinct forms of aggravated burglary, five of which had sufficient numbers to perform meaningful analysis and each of which had a distinct sentencing range. The categories were ‘intimate relationship’, ‘sexual offence related’, ‘confrontational’, ‘robbery- related’, ‘theft-related’ and ‘spontaneous encounters’.
By far the most common category of the offence, accounting for over half of the 178 cases, was confrontational aggravated burglaries. They include cases such as ‘drug run-throughs’ where there is a pre-existing dispute arising from illegal drug dealing and the offender breaks into premises to confront the other party and to take or damage property.
‘Robbery related’ aggravated burglaries accounted for only 12% of the cases analysed. These include offences that are sometimes referred to as ‘home invasions’. The second largest number of offences were categorised as ‘intimate relationship’ aggravated burglaries (16% of cases) which included offences that related to the offender’s intimate partner or former partner.
Aggravated Burglary Current Sentencing Practices is available for download from the Sentencing Advisory Council website.
