Key points
- Roberts was found guilty of the 1998 murders of police officers Gary Silk and Rodney Miller in 2002, but that decision was overturned at a retrial earlier this year after he had spent 20 years in jail for the crime.
- Roberts admitted carrying out a series of 10 armed robberies with Bandali Debs earlier in 1998 but denied he was with Debs in Moorabbin when Silk and Miller were killed.
- His sentence for the armed robberies will be confirmed on Monday.
Jason Roberts won’t be sent back to prison over a string of armed robberies in the late 1990s after spending 22 years in jail before his acquittal of the murders of two police officers.
Two months after he was found not guilty at retrial of murdering Gary Silk and Rodney Miller and released from custody, Roberts on Thursday returned to the Supreme Court – this time on bail – for a pre-sentence hearing over the hold-ups he and Bandali Debs did in the months before the officers were shot dead.
Jason Roberts walks out of custody for the first time in more than two decades after being acquitted of murdering police officers Gary Silk and Rodney Miller in Melbourne’s south-east in 1998.Credit:Jason South
Roberts, 17 at the time of the robberies and now 41, was found not guilty of the shooting murders in July after spending 22 years in jail. Roberts admitted to undertaking the robberies with Debs, who is serving a life sentence over the killings. Roberts was dating Debs’ daughter at the time.
Supreme Court justice Stephen Kaye on Thursday said he would not impose a further term of imprisonment over the robberies when he sentences Roberts on Monday. He said that was because he had accounted for the amount of time Roberts had already served in Barwon Prison for two murders a jury found he did not commit.
“As I’ve made abundantly clear, and as common-sense dictates, your client is going to get nowhere near those 22 years, however I look at it,” Justice Kaye said. He said the case was unique and extraordinary.
Silk and Miller were on a stakeout when they were shot, after they pulled over a blue Hyundai Excel in Cochranes Road, Moorabbin, after midnight on August 16, 1998. The officers had followed the car from outside a nearby Chinese restaurant.
Roberts’ hearing on Thursday was the latest chapter in one of Victoria’s longest-running legal sagas.
A victim impact statement provided to the court by Olivia Coffman, formerly an employee of a Sportsmart outlet targeted by Debs and Roberts, spoke of a life disrupted and ruined by her experience being robbed at gunpoint.
“I feel angry that Roberts lied about the robberies for so many years,” Coffman said.
“I’m constantly in a state of panic. I feel like I had been imprisoned by someone for the past two decades and I was an innocent victim of his crime.”
She said each time Roberts’ case was reported in the media she was reminded of what happened to her, and retraumatised.
Defence lawyer, David Hallowes, SC, said Roberts was at the time heavily influenced by Debs.
“There is an element of him being corrupted by Bendali Debs,” he said.
Hallowes said Debs “loomed large” in Roberts’ life, that Debs was the architect of the armed robberies and was the more aggressive offender.
Bandali Debs outside the Supreme Court in 2002.Credit:Joe Armao
The court heard Roberts told Victoria Police detective Ron Iddles about his involvement with the robberies in 2013.
From March 2013 onwards Roberts was in the Acacia Unit at Barwon Prison, high security, under protection, in lockdown 21 hours a day, confined to a small cell, and with limited contact with other prisoners.
In March, a Supreme Court trial heard that after midnight on June 28, 1998, the owners of the Jade Kew Chinese restaurant were eating a late supper with staff and their adult sons when the men came in armed and wearing rubber masks.
Victims of the hold-ups had previously told the court of Debs asking them lead him to where cash was kept. He gave orders to Roberts who stayed with other workers and customers and bound their hands and ankles with packing tape.
Bobby Lee, whose parents ran the business, said he went to the front door when there was a noise and one of the men pointed a handgun at him and said “where’s the money?”
Lee said he took the first gunman to an office and opened a cash register, which contained about $100 in coins. He said he was taken back to the dining area, where his parents, brother and friends had been told to lay face down.
Justice Kaye extended Roberts’ bail until Monday, when he will be sentenced. Roberts didn’t answer questions from the media as he left court on his way to his lawyer’s office.
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