Serial rapist should have been jailed for longer: judge

Australia [Sydney], September 18: A judge has rejected a bid to cut the sentence for a man involved in the 1988 abduction of Janine Balding, saying he would have put the serial rapist behind bars for even longer for his latest crime.
Wayne Wilmot, 51, was placed under strict monitoring when he left jail earlier in 2024 and was required not to access pornographic material.
But the violent sexual offender was locked up again 11 days later after breaching the court-imposed conditions.
He was sentenced to a further 18 months at Waverley Local Court in July after viewing online pornography, much of which was of an extreme nature.
Wilmot's appeal of this sentence was knocked back on Wednesday in Sydney's Downing Centre District Court.
Judge John Pickering rejected defence arguments the 51-year-old had good prospects of rehabilitation thanks to the support he was due to receive under the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
The judge questioned whether the community would appreciate tens of thousands of NDIS dollars being provided to Wilmot given his ongoing offending.
A sex offender breaching court orders by viewing material that was degrading to women was not encouraging, he said.
"I don't have much optimism for his rehabilitation and the way he has lived his life."
Judge Pickering also questioned why prosecutors had agreed for the matter to be heard in a local court, where a maximum two-year jail term applied.
He said if the matter had come to him in the district court, Wilmot's sentence would have been substantially longer.
"There is no way I would have imposed 18 months' imprisonment," Judge Pickering said.
"We've reached a point with Mr Wilmot where I don't accept it is in the interests of the community that he be released earlier."
Wilmot's graphic searches were uncovered by his supervising officer after he requested help deleting his browser history to make his phone work better, according to court documents.
His searches included "extreme hardcore teen porn videos" and "very very extreme hard f*** porn videos".
There were also searches of a fetish nature and specifying an interest in girls as young as 14.
Wilmot was one of five homeless youths convicted over the 1988 abduction of Ms Balding, a case that stunned the nation due to the brutality involved and the age of the offenders.
The 20-year-old bank teller was repeatedly gang raped before being bound, gagged and held underwater in a dam until she drowned.
Wilmot, who was 15 at the time, was found not to have taken part in the murder but was sentenced to eight years in prison over the abduction and rape.
Before the attack on Ms Balding, he committed three other violent sexual assaults on women in public places.
After being released on parole in 1996, Wilmot robbed one female victim and assaulted another.
In 2023, he was acquitted of two separate charges related to sexual offending while in custody and was placed under an interim detention order, which was extended by the maximum number of times to keep him in jail.
Source: Fijian Broadcasting Cooperation