A man locked up after he threatened a Dickson TAB worker with a gun and fled with $36,000 cash more than a decade ago has won an appeal against his jail term.
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Michael Reginald Baker, 50, pleaded guilty last year to armed robbery and riding in a vehicle without authority for nabbing the cash at gunpoint and escaping in a stolen car on December 30, 2001.
He had stolen the car from Tumut earlier that night. The female cashier was the only person inside when he approached the front glass doors with a gun in his hand about 8pm.
Baker aimed the gun at the woman through the glass and demanded she open the doors before he kicked his way inside and pointed the gun at her.
She tried to call for help but Baker knocked the phone out of her hands with the firearm before pressing the gun into the side of her head as he demanded she open the safe.
He took the money and told the woman, who was hysterical, to lie on the floor before he fled.
Baker had been serving a four-year good behaviour order at the time for a separate armed robbery committed in the ACT in July 1997.
In that heist, he had stormed the Advance Bank in Dickson and threatened staff with a fake handgun. He then lifted $14,680 cash from the teller bays before he fled in a getaway car.
He was charged over the Dickson hold-up when he committed another offence in NSW. DNA police collected after his arrest linked him to fingerprints gleaned from the stolen car used in the robbery.
Baker was sentenced in the ACT Supreme Court to 10 years behind bars with a non-parole period of six years.
He was due to be eligible for release in August 2022.
His lawyers launched an appeal against that sentence in May, arguing the non-parole period and head sentence were were manifestly excessive.
They also said the sentencing judge failed to have regard to "considerations of totality".
On Monday, the full bench of the ACT Court of Appeal partly agreed, and slashed Baker's time in custody.
Chief Justice Helen Murrell, Justice David Mossop and Justice Michael Wigney said in their decision that although the sentence for the "very serious" armed robbery could perhaps be considered harsh, it was not manifestly excessive.
But they found there was merit to Baker's arguments the judge failed to take into account the effect of the jail time with regards to other sentences he was already serving, and delay in dealing with the "stale" offences.
He should have acknowledged Baker had already served a substantial period of imprisonment for similar offences that happened around the same time as the Dickson robbery, and that he was serving overlapping sentences, the judges said.
Baker will now be eligible for release in July 2018.