STATE OF TASMANIA v ANDREW PHILIP SPRINGER 29 FEBRUARY 2024
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE PEARCE J
Andrew Springer, you plead guilty to stalking and bullying. The crime was committed over the course of a period of just over six months between March and September 2020 against a female to whom I will respectfully call the complainant to protect her from further embarrassment. At the time you were both 44. You had worked together years earlier but you began to contact her in 2019 and in August of that year a sexual affair began. At the time she was married and lived with her husband and you were living with your long term partner. You kept the relationship secret. By the end of 2019 there were already signs of what was to come. You separated from your partner in December 2019. You became possessive and jealous of the complainant, you pressured her to end her marriage, threatened to tell her daughter and husband about the affair and made persistent unwanted phone calls even though she attempted to block your number. At the beginning of January 2020 she ended the relationship. She told her husband of the affair. Her mental health was affected. She was hospitalised after she took an overdose of Endone, which she was prescribed at the time for an injury she had suffered. For some reason, during her hospitalisation, she decided to attempt to reconcile with you. Following her discharge from hospital on 15 February 2020 she lived between her parents’ home at Grindelwald or the resort hotel nearby and the sexual relationship with you recommenced.
After the resumption of your relationship your possessive and jealous behaviour continued. After about two weeks, on 3 March 2020, she told you that she did not wish to see you anymore. The conduct which constitutes the crime began almost immediately. During the sentencing hearing I was given a lengthy description of the conduct which I will summarise in a moment. Some facts were disputed. To resolve the dispute I received evidence in the form of agreed facts and sworn evidence from you. I made findings about some facts to which I will refer in the course of these comments.
I will first explain the context in which your acts occurred because it sheds light on your intent and the character of the conduct against the complainant. In December 2019 an interim family violence order was made to protect your long term partner. It was a condition of the order that you be subject to electronic monitoring. The order was based on allegations of family violence committed against your partner throughout your relationship with her including emotional abuse and intimidation of the most serious kind, as well as assaults of her and your son committed in mid-2019. The conduct was the subject of charges to which you subsequently pleaded guilty.
Thus, the conduct I am about to describe directed to the complainant is to be considered in light of the fact that, when it occurred, you were on bail, subject to a family violence order with electronic monitoring to protect another female and, although you had not yet been convicted, you had already committed offences of an alarmingly similar nature against another female. In addition, at about the time the complainant sought to end her relationship with you, you began a relationship with another female which was current during the indictment period. That relationship continued for about two years until February 2022 during which you engaged in similar abusive conduct. In June 2022 you pleaded guilty to emotional abuse and intimidation of that female. The conduct commenced during the period during which you were offending against the complainant, although the more serious aspects of it occurred after the indictment period.
You are not to be punished again for your conduct towards other women, or for the morality of your behaviour, but the facts to which I have referred demonstrate that the acts I am to sentence you for were not isolated. Rather, they were consistent with a single-minded determination to mentally abuse and intimidate females with whom you were in an intimate relationship and impose your will on them regardless of the impact and despite concerted efforts to restrain you.
The criminal conduct against the complainant commenced on 6 March 2020. It was three days after she broke off with you. On that day, in the morning, she was in her room at the Grindelwald resort. After she ignored your phone calls you deceived the hotel receptionist into giving you a key to her room. You went there and entered without her permission. You repeatedly asked her to reconcile with you and refused to leave. Afterwards you waited outside for her to leave, approached her in the car park and made her promise to contact you. When she did not, you went back to the hotel later the same day. Once again you deceived the receptionist into giving you a key to the room. When she did not answer your repeated knocking you let yourself in, yelled at her for not contacting you and begged her to take you back. The prosecution accepts that, for this conduct, you did not intend to cause the proscribed harm but because you ought to have known that it would cause that harm you are taken to have that intent. She told you that she would go to the police if you did not leave her alone.
Thereafter you began sending her text messages to her in large numbers. About two weeks later, on 19 March 2020, you went back to the hotel and waited in your car in the car park, watching out for her to leave which she eventually did. When she drove off with a female friend you followed her. She noticed you from the start. You tailed her all the way into Launceston including through the back streets of Prospect she took to try to get away from you. At one point, when she did manage to lose you, she saw you driving up and down searching for her. Afterwards she responded to your further text messages making absolutely clear that she wanted nothing to do with you and wanted to protect herself from your erratic behaviour. She told you that you had made her scared of you. If, until then, you had difficulty accepting that the relationship was over, you could have been left in no further doubt.
Despite that, on 23 March 2020, you saw the complainant and her daughter outside the City Mission shop in Launceston. It was the prosecution case that you had seen her car and followed her there. The electronic monitoring data was consistent with that scenario. However it was also consistent with your evidence that you were on the way to a shop, had been driving around looking for the shop and a car park, and saw the complainant unexpectedly. I could not exclude that account as a reasonable possibility. However, having seen her you left your car, asked her how she was and said to her “have a good day with your trouble making daughter”. In light of what had already happened, and what she had said to you, you ought to have known that your approach would cause her to be fearful and apprehensive.
On 29 April 2020, after indications from the complainant that she would go to the police if you did not stop contacting her you sent her a message suggesting not only that you were not worried by a police complaint, but that you may make a complaint against her daughter concerning her employment.
On 4 May 2020 you sent the complainant a text message containing a topless photograph you had taken during your relationship. Her face was blacked out and accompanied by a message which asked “You know her”. The complainant took the view, correctly I find, that the message could only have been sent with the intention of causing her to be fearful and apprehensive about what you might do with the photograph and that you were not going to leave her alone. She reported the matter to the police and applied for a restraint order for protection from you. The order was granted by a magistrate and served on you on 11 May 2020. The order prohibited you from contacting her, approaching her or going near her home. Instead, on the same day, you began sending messages to her husband. You then posted a cropped photograph of the complainant in the shower to a Facebook site you created in a false name, and made part of it your cover page. The following day you made the complaint to her daughter’s employer which you had earlier threatened. On 15 May 2020 you made a complaint about her friend and workmate to that employer alleging disclosure of private information. These actions were taken by you not through misguided altruism but with the intention of causing apprehension, mental anguish and humiliation to the complainant.
On 22 May 2020 you went to the public toilet at Tailrace Park, Riverside, and wrote graffiti on the wall inviting approaches for sexual favours with the complainant’ phone number. On 26 May 2022 you went to the public toilets at the shopping complex at Prossers Forest Road, at Waverley Park Lake and at St Leonards Park and wrote similar messages on the walls there. She quickly learned of the messages from others. She told the police that they made her feel sick and to wonder even then about the lengths to which you would go to cause her harm. I am satisfied that this was your intention: to make her fearful, apprehensive and to humiliate her. In fact, during June and July 2020 the complainant in fact received multiple text messages enquiring about sexual services. At the sentencing hearing you denied that you were responsible for the graffiti and gave evidence disputing the assertion. The electronic monitoring device evidence established your presence at each of those four locations at the time and on the days consistent with you being responsible for the writing. The evidence established that the visit to each location was brief, somewhere between two and four minutes. On 26 May you drove directly between each location and all three visits occurred within a total period of about 20 minutes. However you claimed that the words were written, without your knowledge, by a female in your company at the time. You did not know her surname but she was a person you met while performing community service and befriended and spent time with. You suggested that on 22 May 2020 you met at Tailrace Park for a brief sexual liaison. You said that on 26 May you picked her up in your car and she appeared hung over. When cross examined about why you went to the three toilets on that day your explanation was that the female told you she was very hung over and feeling sick, and, on two occasions at least, she needed somewhere to be sick. You said that you she told you a day or two later that she was responsible for the graffiti, that she had got the complainant’ phone number from your phone without your knowledge, and she thought she was doing you a favour. I found these to be obvious lies. That was so because the scenario that you would be at each of the locations of the graffiti, on those days, within that time frame, for some innocent reason, and the person who you happened to be with took it upon herself, without your knowledge or approval, to write the graffiti including a phone number she had somehow obtained from your phone, even if on the pretence that that she went inside to be sick, or that she really was sick, was so implausible that it may be excluded as a reasonable possibility.
Between 29 May 2020 and 30 June 2020 the stalking and bullying principally took the form of Facebook posts. I was given details of 23 such posts made during the period of just over a month, all made with the intention that the complainant would know of them. By that time she was living in a relatively isolated rural area where she kept horses and a dog. The Facebook posts included cropped or altered intimate photographs of her, photographs taken near her home or comments suggesting you had gone near there, suggestions that you had again been to Grindelwald, suggestions that you had seen that she was neglecting her horses, implied threats of harm to them and her dog, an implied threat against another male friend of hers, posts implying that you were keeping an eye on her and posts taunting about her husband, her appearance, her infidelity and her previous use of Endone. Relevant to the posts about her horses you, on 1 June 2020, from a false email address you created in the name of the complainant’s daughter, sent a complaint to the RSPCA alleging she was neglecting the animals.
On 30 June 2020 your home was searched by the police. You were arrested and charged with summary offences arising from the conduct to which I have referred. You were admitted to bail with a condition that you not use Facebook. That did not stop you. You turned to another social media application, Instagram, where you established an account with a name referring to the complainant’ address. Then, on 21 separate occasions between 15 July and 1 September you uploaded images, captions and memes referencing occasions of intimacy during your sexual relationship, referring to the poisoning of or threats to animals, referring to her appearance, infidelity and Endone use. One such communication contained the caption “let the slut shaming begin” and in another you referred to her as “being yours.”
After 1 September 2020 you returned to use of Facebook. In some posts you sought to take advantage of an exception to the bail condition which by then allowed for posts regarding your employment. You did so by including spurious references to work in posts which really concerned the complainant. You continued to use Instagram. Between 1 September and your second arrest on 21 September 2020 there were 11 more communications on Facebook or Instagram which included more cropped or altered intimate photos, taunts about her daughter, her husband, her horses and her dog.
The intent of all of these acts and communications during the periods to which I have referred was to cause mental anguish and humiliation, to not only embarrass, humiliate and cause her fear and apprehension by the content of the posts, but also to make clear that you intended to continue your torment notwithstanding the restraint order, your arrest and bail conditions. It was suggested on your behalf that some of your acts were motivated, at least in part, by a misplaced concern for the complainant or a sense of altruism that others should know some of the things you were publishing. Even if it is true it serves only to highlight what must have been your distorted sense of reality. In light of the nature and content of the acts, in all the circumstances, they can only be rationally explained by an intent to harm.
You are now aged 48. You have no relevant record of offending prior to 2019 but you cannot claim to be of otherwise good character because your criminal conduct against your former partner occurred throughout the course of that long relationship. You have an industrious background. The effect of the December 2019 order made against you was that you were unable to continue what had been stable employment. You moved to Launceston and received only social security benefits. That was the result of your own actions and does not excuse or even explain your conduct. Your behaviour was affected by heavy abuse of alcohol. You claim that many of the posts made concerning the complainant were made late at night when you were drunk, and you have limited memory of them. That could not be a factor of any weight in your favour. These were not isolated acts which you could have forgotten about. The conduct was repeated over an extended period even though all of the communications were accessible on your phone until your devices were seized for the second time in September 2020. You have some health issues which will be more difficult to address if sentenced to imprisonment.
In January 2020 you were fined for possession of an unregistered shotgun a year earlier, but it was for use around your then home in a rural environment and was not related to offences against female partners. It has little relevance to sentence. On 5 November 2020 the charges of emotional abuse and intimidation of your long term partner throughout the term of your relationship of more than 20 years, two counts of assaulting her and one count of assaulting your son in 2019 were dealt with by a magistrate. You were sentenced to imprisonment for eight months, wholly suspended for two years, and 98 hours of community service. That suspended sentence was re-imposed in June 2022. However, on 15 December 2022 you pleaded guilty to emotional abuse and intimidation of the other female between February 2020 and August 2022, some of which acts constituted a breach of the suspended term. The result was activation of the eight month term and imposition of a further term of five months, a total of 13 months from 15 September 2022, all of which term I am informed was served by you.
Your counsel submits that although the charge you are now to be sentenced for is indictable, it may be regarded as objectively less serious than the offences to which I have referred, both of which were committed against a person with whom you were in a significant relationship over a much longer offending period. In the case of the first sentence it included charges of actual violence. The second sentence was aggravated because it was committed in breach of a suspended sentence. I take that submission into account but the fact that those sentences were imposed does not make them correct nor fetter my discretion. I was also referred to five other sentences imposed for stalking since 2019, only one of which resulted in imposition of an actual term of imprisonment. I have considered the objective gravity of those crimes and length of the head sentences imposed. Each case depends on its individual circumstances about which, in any event, I may take a different view.
I was asked to take into account a report prepared in June 2023 by a clinical psychologist, Dr Amy Washington, for the purposes of an application for parole. It does not indicate any mental health condition or deficit relevant to sentence. It indicates, at least at the time of the report, impaired thinking in relation to family violence offending, evidence of victim blaming and minimisation of behaviours. Dr Washington assessed alcohol abuse as a significant contributing factor and suggested that you may have met the criteria for alcohol abuse disorder. Those factors combined to lead her to conclude that, without intervention, you posed at that time a high continuing risk of offences of this nature. I will address the plea of guilty shortly but I am not satisfied that it carries genuine remorse. I find, from the evidence you gave, that you still do not have proper insight into the wrongfulness of your conduct or the impact it had and continues to have. You professed continuing affection for the complainant which, in light of your actions, had a distinctly hollow ring. You have however, since your release from custody, taken steps to obtain treatment to address alcohol abuse. You were prepared to complete the FVOIP but were not accepted as a candidate.
You pleaded guilty on the morning of 5 February 2024, the day the trial was due to commence. The plea came without notice to the prosecution after the matter had been fully prepared for trial with an estimated hearing time of two weeks, too late to avoid the loss of at least some court time and when the case had been substantially prepared for trial once before but adjourned. It was necessary for the complainant to be briefed twice. Not all of these circumstances can be attributed to you. Although you were charged on 5 November 2020 and the indictment was filed on 9 June 2021, draft particulars of the alleged stalking conduct were not delivered until 19 October 2023. Then, at a late stage, further disclosure was made by the prosecution and the possible need for examination of mobile devices seized by the police arose.
Mitigation does arise from the plea. Although it came at a very late stage it relieved the complainant of the additional trauma of having to give evidence and avoided the need for the trial. The plea could have been entered earlier, but, in my view, not sufficiently early to have avoided the adjournment of the first trial. I accept that the plea is some indication that you accept responsibility for your actions but, as I have said, not of insight or remorse. It is relevant that since this crime was committed you have served a substantial term of imprisonment for the other offences to which I have referred, having not been to prison before. That may already have at least partly addressed the need for specific deterrence.
The impact of the crime is relevant to sentence. The complainant’s victim impact statement conveys the type of reaction which might be expected to result from crimes of this nature. She said that your conduct intruded on every aspect of her life. She was constantly frightened of what you might do and that you might turn up at her home. Her sleep was affected and she had nightmares. Every time her phone received a message she thought it might be you. Her relationships with friends and family were affected. I find that your primary intention was to produce such results. Her fear persists and her hyper vigilance became ingrained. She worries that she may never be safe from you. Her already fragile mental health was made worse. I was asked to make a restraint order to provide the complainant with continuing protection but I cannot do so because, unlike a magistrate acting in accordance with the Justices Act 1959, s 22, I cannot exercise the powers of justices under s 106J.
I regard this as a serious crime. Although the offending period was not as long as in some other cases it was nevertheless relentless and cruel and damaging and you only stopped because you were forced to. You were not in a significant relationship in the legal sense but it was one of particular intimacy and you breached the trust which was inherent in it. With the exception of the occasions on 6 and 23 March to which I earlier referred, every act was accompanied by the specific intent to cause mental harm, extreme humiliation or to cause the complainant to be apprehensive or fearful. That was so despite your knowledge of her vulnerability and in pursuit of your wish to demonstrate power over her and punish her for not reconciling with you. I was asked to consider imposition of a period of home detention. However I have concluded that, while home detention does carry a significant restriction on liberty, it would not sufficiently address the need for punishment and general deterrence, and the remaining need for specific deterrence. There is a distinct need to give such protection a court is able to provide to women in the position of the complainant by imposition of sentences which sufficiently punish and deter. In my view the only appropriate sentence is a term of imprisonment, some of which is to be actually served. In light of the period you have already spent in prison I will suspend part of the term.
Andrew Springer, you are convicted on the indictment. I am not satisfied that you do not pose a risk of committing a reportable offence within the meaning of that term in the Community Protection (Offender Reporting) Act 2005 in the future. I make an order directing that the Registrar cause your name to be placed on the Register and that you comply with the reporting obligations under the Act for a period five years from your release. You are sentenced to imprisonment for 18 months from today. I suspend nine months of that term for two years on condition that you commit no offence punishable by imprisonment during that period. I make no order as to parole.