Surgeon killer could be first to get 10-year term under one-punch laws
A man who fatally hit a surgeon at Box Hill Hospital could become the first person jailed under Victoria's one-punch laws and be given a mandatory minimum of 10 years behind bars.
Joseph Esmaili, 24, was last year found guilty of manslaughter after a jury found he killed Patrick Pritzwald-Stegmann by punching the heart surgeon once to the face in the foyer area of the hospital on May 30, 2017.
Mr Pritzwald-Stegmann was unconscious as he fell, the Supreme Court has heard, and suffered critical injuries when his head hit the tiled floor. The father of young twin girls had his life support turned off four weeks later.
Mr Pritzwald-Stegmann and Esmaili exchanged words after the surgeon approached the young man and his friends and told them not to smoke in a designated non-smoking area outside the hospital.
Prosecutors confirmed to Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth on Friday they had filed papers requesting Esmaili be jailed for at least a decade.
The 2014 laws were introduced following a series of one-punch deaths but have never been used. In 2017 prosecutors withdrew applications to use the laws against Richard Vincec, who killed Jaiden Walker through a punch thrown in a Melbourne street, and Andrew Lee, who fatally punched Patrick Cronin in a bar brawl in Diamond Creek.
Chief Crown prosecutor Brendan Kissane, QC, on Friday said Esmaili should be jailed for the mandatory 10 years because his crime satisfied the law's key four elements: that his punch was deliberate, to the head, that Mr Pritzwald-Stegmann wouldn't have expected it was coming, and that Esmaili probably knew the surgeon wouldn't have been expecting a punch.
"This is a punch that comes out of the blue. [Esmaili's] hands were behind [his] back and then the punch was delivered," Mr Kissane said.
More to come