Source : Perth Now news
Long earnest letters, a prison chaplain’s endorsement and a matured man changed for the better by his time in the clink.
All that separates this saga from the Shawshank Redemption is a daring prison break.
In April 2019, Cem Batak, then aged 26, gave his former schoolmate Cengiz Coskun a handgun with an extended magazine full of at least 16 lethal rounds.
A few hours later, Coskun and another unidentified person climbed onto the balcony of an inner-western Sydney apartment where a drug dealer lived, to carry out a “drug rip” of a stash of cocaine and ecstasy worth nearly half a million dollars.
Batak had been “struck by an urgent need to go to the toilet” and had bailed on the heist at the last minute, a judge said.
Coskun was confident the robbery would be easy but after meeting resistance he let a hail of bullets loose from Batak’s handgun.
The intruders fled empty-handed leaving one occupant of the apartment, 25-year-old John Odisho, dead.
A promising footballer, Mr Odisho had just re-signed with the Parramatta Melita Eagles to play in the National Premier League 3, with his death prompting outpourings of grief from the community.
Coskun was arrested that day and later sentenced to 34 years in prison.
Police handcuffed Batak four months later, commencing a legal saga spanning the better part of a decade which included two trials, an appeal, an aborted retrial, an aborted High Court proceeding, and a retrial.
Now 33, Batak’s forehead and neatly cropped thatch of dark hair were the only things visible on camera when he dialled into the NSW Supreme Court from custody.
He is guilty of murdering Mr Odisho and being an accessory to armed robbery for supplying Coskun with the deadly weapon, Justice Deborah Sweeney reiterated on Friday.
But Batak is a changed man, she said.
“He is not the man who committed the crime in 2019, or even the man sentenced … in September 2022,” Justice Sweeney told the court.
She mentioned a long letter Batak’s sister had written about him, and another from Muslim chaplain Ahmed Kilani saying he “worked diligently and was entrusted and respected to act as a delegate on behalf of other inmates”.
“Among other attributes Mr Batak has been a positive older influence for younger Muslim inmates,” chaplain Mohamad Halloum wrote in May, accompanying positive references from employers and the manager of the gym Batak attended while on bail.
Batak also penned his own letter to the court, saying he had “come a long way from the immature boy heard in the recorded conversations from 2019 which featured in evidence in his trial,” the judge relayed.
“Mr Batak has achieved substantial rehabilitation and maturation,” she said, reducing his sentence from 14 to 12 years, backdated to start in August 2020.
He had no intention the gun would be fired and was misled by Coskun’s promise of an easy robbery, the judge found, disputing a previous ruling that Batak understood the weapon could be discharged with fatal consequences.
Batak will be eligible for parole in August 2029.
