Captured prison escapee asks court for freedom
Aaron Bunch |
A notorious bank robber and fugitive dubbed the “Postcard Bandit”, who was jailed after escaping from one of the nation’s toughest prisons, is making another bid for freedom.
Brenden James Abbott is seeking to have his incarceration declared unlawful and is also suing the West Australian government for wrongful imprisonment in the state’s Supreme Court.
The 63-year-old, who escaped from Fremantle Prison in 1989, claims that sentencing laws introduced in November 1996 do not apply to him and that his WA custodial sentence lapsed while he was in custody in Queensland.
He is also seeking to challenge the constitutional validity of the laws, which require an inmate returned to prison after an escape to serve an additional imprisonment equal to one third of the time they were at large, on top of the time they had yet to serve when escaping.
Abbott’s son James says his father has been behind bars for too long.
“If you do the crime, you do the time,” he told AAP outside court on Tuesday.
“But the amount of time that dad has done for what he’s done is more than enough.
“He’s paid his debt to society and he deserves to spend time with his family.”
Abbott is a maximum security inmate at Perth’s Casuarina Prison, where he is serving a 14-year sentence for bank robbery, a prison riot and escaping from Fremantle Prison in 1989.
He was extradited to Perth in May 2016 after serving 18 years in Brisbane prisons, following his recapture in Darwin in May 1998.
He had escaped from Sir David Longland Prison in Brisbane in November 1997, when he was serving a sentence for bank robberies on the Gold Coast.
Abbott had been arrested on the Gold Coast in March 1995, five-and-a-half years after he escaped from Fremantle Prison and embarked on a covert life as a fugitive, suspected of robbing banks in WA, South Australia and Queensland of up to $5 million.
Abbott is technically eligible for parole in WA in October 2026. But as a prisoner who has served more than 25 years, but is not subject to a life sentence, his situation is unique.
There is a genuine prospect Abbott will never be granted parole and won’t be released until his maximum term expires in January 2033, which would be 34 years and eight months after his recapture in Darwin.
In 2017, he was sentenced to a concurrent five-year jail term for the 1989 Fremantle Prison escape.
The hearing continues.
AAP
