The parity principle does not require that co-offenders receive the same type of sentence (suspended vs immediate imprisonment) where the circumstances that made one co-offender's case exceptional — such as having nothing to gain, no drug involvement, and being drawn into the enterprise by others — are absent in the cases of the other co-offenders. The legislature's provision for suspended sentences under s 76 of the Sentencing Act 1995 (WA) incorporates the objective possibility that one co-offender may serve immediate imprisonment while another has a similar sentence suspended, and this does not give rise to a justifiable sense of grievance where the different sentences reflect genuinely different circumstances.
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