23-y-o facing 9 years

He committed armed robbery while on parole for other offending

SHOULD recidivist offender Mitchell Thomas Malcolm Skinner be unsuccessful in obtaining early release on parole, by the time he is due to complete his jail sentences he would have spent nine years in prison.

The now 23-year-old was sentenced to three years in jail by the Warwick District Court in August 2016 for two armed robberies.

However, on June 6, 2017, he was sentenced by Toowoomba Supreme Court to 30 months in jail for trafficking meth which he committed while on bail for the robberies.

Yesterday he appeared by video from the prison to plead guilty before the same court to a violent robbery of a service station west of Warwick on May 7 last year and to having 336 ecstasy tablets with a pure meth weight of 19.879g found during a police search of his home on May 25 last year and to five counts of supplying a dangerous drug.

Crown prosecutor Mark Green said Skinner had pushed over the female attendant at the BP service station at Oman Ama near Inglewood just after 7am and held a crow bar above his head demanding she tell him and his co-offender where the safe was.

Told the safe had been stolen weeks earlier, he then demanded the till and cigarettes and he and his accomplice had left in a Commodore captured on CCTV camera.

He was arrested when police searched his home on

May 25 last year when he was charged along with his then partner Billie Maree Hoch, 20, who also pleaded guilty to possessing a dangerous drug above the 2g schedule.

She was sentenced to three years probation with no conviction recorded.

Skinner’s barrister Jessica Goldie told the court since being in jail this time her client had been working as a timber estimator and training new inmates in that field.

He was also completing a drug rehabilitation course.

Overall her client had already served about four years.

Justice Peter Callaghan said Skinner was in need of supervision when he got out of prison and sentenced him to a further three and a half years jail to be served from October next year when his current sentence ended but ordered he be eligible for parole as of September 24 this year.

“I don’t think you’ll get parole on that day but it will fix your mind,” Justice Callaghan told Skinner.