Teen jailed for autistic man's death

A teenager who stabbed an autistic man to death in a Sydney toilet block has been sentenced to seven years in jail.

Thirty-five-year-old Gerard Fleming, who had a mild form of autism, died after being stabbed twice in a toilet block at Narrabeen, on Sydney's northern beaches, in 2007.

A Year 11 student, who was 16 at the time, was found guilty of manslaughter.

The court heard the teenager had been drinking with Gerard Fleming, but told a friend the 35-year-old tried to rape him in the toilet block, which was a well-known gay beat.

In handing down the sentence, Justice Kirby said the crime was compulsive and the offender was remorseful.

But he said human life is sacred and it was still a senseless death that had arisen from a misunderstanding.

He sentenced the teenager to seven years' jail with a non-parole period of three-and- a-half years.

NSW conviction and jail rates still on rise

THE number of people sentenced to jail in NSW continues to rise, as does the conviction rate.

The latest figures show that 87 per cent of people who appear before the local courts plead guilty or are found guilty.

The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research's criminal court statistics, which were released yesterday, show that the proportion of people found guilty in the District and Supreme courts and sentenced to jail rose from 66.7 per cent to 69.9 per cent last year.

There was also a small rise in the number of people jailed after being sentenced in the local court system, but the bureau's director, Don Weatherburn, said there was a slight decrease in the number of Aborignal people given a jail sentence.

The figures also show there was a significant rise in the number of committals to the Supreme Court that ended with a guilty plea rather than going to trial - 46 per cent in 2007 compared to 31 per cent the previous year.

In the Children's Court, the proportion of young offenders sentenced to juvenile detention rose to more than 10 per cent.

Dr Weatherburn said 83 per cent of people appearing before District or Supreme courts pleaded guilty or were found guilty.

"As in past years, the conviction rate remains high," he said.

Dr Weatherburn said the statistics also revealed that people were spending less time in custody from the time they were committed to stand trial in the District Court until their case was finished. He said the median time spent in custody was 188 days, down from 207 days the previous year.

The most common offence before local courts was non-aggravated assault, followed by traffic offences, including drink- driving and driving with a cancelled or suspended licence.

In the higher courts, the most common offences were sexual assault, break and enter, robbery and extortion. The average age of men found guilty in those courts was 32; for women it was 33.5.

More youth, women committing violent crimes

Queensland's Police Commissioner says more young people and more women are committing violent crimes.

Bob Atkinson says police figures show children as young as 12 are increasingly becoming involved in serious offences.

He says there has also been a rise in the use of knives, swords and machetes.

"Seems to be happening across the board and certainly in other parts of Australia," he said.

"Obviously it's linked, generally speaking, to groups of young men or young men in ones or twos thinking that they need to be armed."

Rural footy league sees two-thirds of teams hit by suicide

A regional Victorian Australian football league has launched a suicide prevention course, after the deaths of players from eight of the 12 teams that make up the competition.

After a number of suicides since 1999, the Goulburn Valley Football League has teamed up with local organisation Family Care in a bid to identify depression among young men before it is too late.

Family Care's David Mellington says the Coaching the Coaches program gives coaches and players mental health training to help spot troubled players.

"The program uses the football team structure to effectively reach young men in rural towns to increase the recognition of suicide risk and the encouragement of both self-help and professional-help seeking behaviours," he said.

"It aims to try and assist the people that are studying the course in identifying the early warning signs of mental disorder and some basic first aid methods in which we can deal with those disorders."

Lorraine Appleby's son Gary committed suicide in 1999, the weekend after his team won the premiership.

She says that despite working with her son every day on the family's dairy farm, she had no insight into the depression he was suffering.

"We didn't have any awareness at all because we didn't know anything about depression," she said.

Ms Appleby says it is only since her son died that she has learnt the tell-tale signs of depression.

"I went to a suicide awareness program which was run by the CWA in conjunction with Lifeline and the young gentleman from Lifeline was really good and gave us information as to what the signs of depression were, and suddenly it all fell into place," she said.

Lawyers struggle to explain teenage murder motives

Lawyers for two teenagers have told the Perth Children's Court experts have been unable to determine why the girls turned into murderers.

The two girls were 16 in June last year when they put a cloth soaked in chemicals over the face of 15-year-old Eliza Davis and strangled her with a piece of wire.

Her body was found in a shallow grave underneath a house in Collie, in south-west Western Australia, in June last year.

The court has been told the pair have shown a complete lack of remorse and emotion over what has been described as a sadistic, callous and cold-blooded murder.

The girls have provided no explanation for the murder, other than telling police it felt right, even though they knew it was wrong.

Today their lawyers submitted that both girls had troubled upbringings.

One had not dealt with the tragic death of her mother while the second fell into the so-called 'goth' culture and had a preoccupation with death.

Outside the court, one of the police officers who worked on the case, Detective Senior Sergeant Steve Post, said the case highlighted a disturbing trend in society.

"We've seen in recent times where young girls are taking the lives of others - I just wonder what we're exposing our children to in this society when things like that happen," he said.

Eliza Davis's father, Steve, said the girls had shown no remorse.

"I can't see any option for the judge except to give them a good long sentence," he said.

Prosecutors have called for the girls to be given life imprisonment when they are sentenced next month.

Lawyers struggle to explain teenage murder motives