Punch drunk justice

AUSTRALIAN boxing champ Danny Green did not make a career out of pulling his punches.

Green pulls no punches out of the ring, too — as a public campaigner raising awareness of the potential lethal dangers of blindside assaults.

After seeing the light sentences the courts sometimes give “one-punch killers”, his societal critique broadened to the justice system.

As we report today, that critique has become decidedly more pointed and specific in relation to the sentencing of Ocean Grove man Richard Vincec.

Vincec was on drugs when he punched 22-year-old Jaiden Walker outside a Melbourne bar.

Mr Walker’s head hit the ground with a “deafening cracking sound” and he died a week later, leaving behind shocked and grieving family and loved ones.

After pleading guilty to manslaughter, Vincec was sentenced to eight years in jail, but is more likely to serve his minimum of just five.

Certainly there are factors that led to this sentence.

Vincec ultimately did not fight the charge and he is unlikely to have had the intention to kill when he perpetrated his dangerous and ultimately deadly act.

But Vincec also escaped being jailed for a mandatory 10year term under Victorian laws implemented to discourage coward punches because he went down for manslaughter and not the freshly crafted new offence of death from a coward punch.

And this will leave many in the community, as Green says, fuming.

Particularly since one of the factors in the court’s reasoning was that Vincec might struggle in prison.

Many in the community would say that is what prison is for — to have a harder life than the free one you enjoyed in the community before your violence breached the social contract.

The community is losing patience with soft sentencing.

Green is correct that our courts need to wise up to reality.