Alex Mitchell and Will Nicholas
Australia’s youngest convicted murderer has been handed more time behind bars after a judge found him to have had complete disregard for his release conditions.
The man, known for legal reasons as SLD, has spent almost two-thirds of his life in jail after the then 13-year-old abducted and fatally stabbed his three-year-old neighbour Courtney Morley-Clarke on the NSW Central Coast in 2001.
The now 39-year-old pleaded guilty to five counts of breaching his supervisory orders and two charges relating to child abuse material.
After declaring “this is doing my head in”, Judge Paul Johnson wrestled with the sentencing arithmetic handwritten on a piece of notepaper.
He eventually deputised a barrister armed with a calculator before pronouncing a final sentence of four years and six months’ imprisonment.
The 39-year-old will be eligible for parole in March 2028.
“The reality is that … he cannot last long in the community without breaching the terms of his extended supervision order,” Johnson said in Campbelltown District Court on Wednesday.
The sentence took into account a mandatory minimum of four years’ imprisonment for a repeat child sexual offence, the first being his 2002 murder.
The judge also remarked that, since the age of 13, the defendant had spent all but four months behind bars.
“When you put someone in a custody setting at 13 … you hold them in time at that sense and level of maturity,” his lawyer Dev Bhutani had told the court earlier in the proceedings.
When they examined SLD’s phone in 2025, police had found an image of a five-year-old girl naked from the waist down.
Another 43 images downloaded onto his device showed women in sexually violent situations including being tied up, looking scared or in pain, and having hands placed over their mouths.
“These offences before me are of increasing concern,” Judge Johnson said.
“(They) can only really be said to be a complete disregard for what he has been ordered to do.”
While free in the community, the man had been barred from using social networking services or dating sites without approval or under an alias, and was blocked from using VPNs or incognito mode to mask his browsing.
He was also only permitted to view sexually explicit material on a single pornographic website, but was told not to watch anything involving sexual violence or cruelty towards women or children.
The man boasted to corrections officers they would not find anything on his phone and referenced his ability to delete internet history, use the dark web and access dating sites, court documents revealed.
Johnson acknowledged the man’s childhood hardship, remorse, low IQ and guilty plea in handing down his sentence, but rated his rehabilitation and reoffending prospects poorly.
“His cluster of difficulties make his time in custody more onerous,” the judge said.
AAP
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