The Court of Appeal ultimately found Michael O’Connell, now aged 45, not guilty of murder. Photo: Facebook.
A man acquitted of murdering his on-and-off-again partner on appeal has been sentenced for stalking a different woman over several weeks by repeatedly installing spyware on her mobile phone.
Michael O’Connell was found guilty of murdering 40-year-old Danielle Patricia Fleming, also known as Danielle Jordan, at the end of his ACT Supreme Court jury trial and was sentenced to 15 years’ jail.
But earlier this year, the ACT Court of Appeal set aside the jury’s guilty verdict, as well as O’Connell’s jail sentence, when ordering he be found not guilty of murder.
On Friday (25 July), prosecutor Sofia Janackovic told the ACT Magistrates Court that the proceedings in the higher court were not finished as the court had reserved the question of whether it should enter an alternative verdict of manslaughter.
“That is still up in the air,” she said.
O’Connell, who has stayed in custody, was back before the lower court as he had to be sentenced for a charge of stalking, which related to a different woman and took place over about three weeks in 2021.
The court heard he secretly installed spyware on the woman’s mobile phone, which allowed him to track where her phone was and view its messages, contacts, calls and calendar remotely, as well as when she was pressing buttons on the device.
After she confronted him, he admitted installing the software and deleted it. But later, he accessed her phone again and installed a different spyware without her knowledge.
This allowed him to look at her messages and calls again.
“This is one of the most heinous types of stalking,” Chief Magistrate Lorraine Walker said, as it breached a person’s privacy when they largely had no idea about it.
The woman wrote a statement for the court in which she said she constantly felt like she was being watched at the time, and the offences made her feel violated and powerless.
“I lost my sense of freedom,” she said.
Defence lawyer Ewan Small of Legal Aid said his client’s day-to-day life was marred by substance abuse in 2021. He said that did not excuse his client’s conduct, but put it in a different context.
Mr Small said the 45-year-old father-of-five now expressed a strong abhorrence of illicit substances and had remained abstinent from drugs.
Ms Janackovic noted how O’Connell only pleaded guilty to his stalking on the day he had originally planned to contest the charge in a court hearing.
Chief Magistrate Walker said the offending was premeditated as O’Connell had bought two sets of spyware and put it on the woman’s phone twice before lying to her about it.
“Offending of this type brings down the standard of our whole community,” she said.
O’Connell pleaded guilty to a charge of stalking with the intent to harass.
He was convicted and sentenced to 12 months’ jail, backdated to his arrest in April 2022, which means it has now been served.
However, he remains in custody while the other matter remains in the higher court.
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