A man who raped a sex worker at a Kiama motel after threatening to kill her with a knife has had his minimum jail term quadrupled on appeal.
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Robert John Hall had got away with rape for 23 years and was only caught after a tiny slip. In sentencing him to a non-parole period of a year in September a District Court judge declared him already rehabilitated because he lived an upstanding life on the run.
Now the Court of Criminal Appeal has ruled that the original sentence was manifestly inadequate and increased it to four years.
His overall sentence was increased from five to seven years.
In March 1990, Hall, then 32, hired a motel room at Kiama and called an escort agency. The victim who attended the motel, was 23 years old. It was her first day working for the escort agency. She cannot be identified.
Soon after she arrived at the motel, Hall approached her from behind with a knife and threatened her, telling her that she would get hurt unless she did exactly what he told her. She thought that he might cut her throat with the knife.
He forced her to face the wall on her kneeds and threatened to kill her when she turned around. He blindfolded her with sticking plaster. He forced her to perform oral sex on him. Hall dragged the victim by the ear onto the bed, threatened her then raping her.
The victim made an immediate complaint to the taxi driver who was waiting outside the motel. Police were called by the motel's reception and she was taken to Wollongong Hospital. A police investigation was closed in 1990 when no suspect could be identified.
But in 2007 Hall was charged when he failed to pay for petrol in Queensland. A DNA sample was obtained and later placed on the national DNA database.
NSW Police were notified in 2010 that a DNA profile matching the respondent and linking him to the sexual assaults had been obtained. He was arrested in 2013 and tried in late 2016.
In his original sentencing, District Court Judge Peter Whitford said Hall was already reformed before custody, even as he continued to deny the offences.
In his remarks, Judge Whitford noted Hall's "objectively quite terrible criminal conduct", his lack of remorse and the psychological harm inflicted on the victim. On the other hand, he said the assaults took place over a "relatively short" period of time.
Judge Whitford paid greatest attention to the character Hall had displayed since 1990, including "exemplary devotion to his family" as a husband of 20 years and as an "idolised" father and grandfather.
While factoring in Hall's good conduct in the decades since the offence, Judge Whitford also found him entitled to receive some sentence reduction because his crimes belonged to a time when rape sentences were much lighter.
The judge ordered the prison terms be served at the same time, over a maximum of five years, as they all related to the one course of criminal conduct. The one-year non-parole term meant Hall would have been eligible for release in August next year.
The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions appealed. The Court of Criminal Appeal judges found "there is a significant disconnect between the judge's assessment of the criminality involved and the setence he imposed. That applies to the head sentence and particularly to the non-parole period."
They also found the "offences were not of 'short duration' and the fact that the victim did not sustain any significant physical harm does not lessen the seriousness of the offences'. He will be eligible for parole in 2021.
