Where a federal offender commits a new offence while on parole and is sentenced in New South Wales, s 19AA(2) of the Crimes Act 1914 (Cth) entitles the offender to credit for 'clean street time' in calculating the outstanding sentence. The mechanical operation of s 19AS(1)(d), which fixes the commencement of the outstanding sentence to the date of imposition of the new sentence, makes it impossible to impose a sentence that does not involve some distortion of common law and statutory sentencing principles. Two alternative approaches are available: reducing the new sentence term to reflect pre-sentence custody (the Hughes approach), or backdating the new sentence to a date later than arrest to reflect the outstanding sentence. Neither is wrong, but the reasoning must be transparent.
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