Background
Jennifer Reay Lekic, a 73-year-old widow living alone in Proserpine on a disability support pension, pleaded guilty in the District Court at Mackay to three counts of recklessly engaging in money laundering under s 250(1)(b) of the Criminal Proceeds Confiscation Act 2002 (Qld), which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment. The offending spanned approximately four months in late 2022 and early 2023 and involved a total of approximately $450,000 passing through bank accounts she had opened. The largest single transaction involved $447,793.50 paid by Honeywell Limited into her account as a result of fraudulent invoices sent from a compromised supplier’s email system; Lekic subsequently transferred those funds onward. Two smaller counts related to rental-deposit scam proceeds of $2,400 and $900 respectively.
Lekic had been manipulated by a person she knew online as “Raymond Marino,” whom she met while playing Facebook games at a time when she was isolated and depressed following the deaths of her youngest son (by suicide in 2017), her husband (2018, after she had cared for him through multiple sclerosis for decades), and the ex-partner of her middle son (2021). She had no criminal history. Critically, police had formally warned her about money-laundering conduct in July 2022, and the subject offending commenced within six months of that warning. A clinical psychologist, Dr Keen, assessed her as meeting criteria for Persistent Depressive Disorder, Generalised Anxiety Disorder, PTSD, and high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder, concluding that her ASD impaired her “theory of mind” and, together with her other conditions, diminished her insight into the consequences and impact of her conduct.
The District Court sentenced her to concurrent terms of 12 months imprisonment on each of counts 1 and 2, and 3 years imprisonment on count 3 (the head sentence), with parole release fixed at 15 July 2026—meaning approximately three months of actual custody. Lekic sought leave to appeal on two grounds: (1) that the sentencing judge made a factual error by inferring she had received a personal financial benefit from the offending; and (2) that the head sentence of three years was manifestly excessive.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeal (Bond JA, Brown JA, and Cooper J, with reasons delivered by Cooper J) granted leave and allowed the appeal. On the factual error ground, the Court accepted that the sentencing judge did err in inferring that Lekic had made a profit of $900 from count 2, when both the statement of facts and the Crown’s own submissions acknowledged it was unknown whether she received any personal benefit. However, the Court held that this error was not material: the sentencing judge’s reasoning turned on the amount laundered, the facilitation of fraud, and the prior police warning—none of which were affected by the mistaken profit inference—and the sentence would have been no different absent the error. Appellate intervention on that ground alone was not warranted.
On manifest excess, the Court found the head sentence of three years was unreasonable or plainly unjust when compared with comparable sentencing decisions. In particular, the Court contrasted Lekic’s sentence with those in R v Hannan [2019] 2 Qd R 213 (three-year head sentence for knowingly laundering $649,189 over three years, an objectively more serious offence carrying double the maximum penalty) and R v Kefford [2022] QCA 81 (four-year head sentence for knowingly laundering over $2.1 million, also after a police warning, with the offender motivated by greed and receiving $92,000 in personal benefit). The Court reasoned that the greater moral culpability reflected in the higher maximum for the “knowingly” variant, the larger sums, and the longer offending periods in those cases were not properly reflected in Lekic receiving a head sentence equal to Hannan’s and only one year less than Kefford’s.
The Court further held that the sentencing judge had given insufficient weight to the significant mitigating finding—accepted by the judge himself—that Lekic’s diagnosed conditions impaired her ability to discern the consequences of her actions and their impact on others. That finding bore directly on her moral culpability and reduced the claims of both general and personal deterrence upon the sentencing discretion. The sentencing discretion was therefore found to have miscarried. The Court reduced the head sentence on count 3 from three years to two years and, because Lekic had already served more than the minimum required, fixed her parole release date on all counts at 3 June 2026 (the day of the hearing), ordering her immediate release.
Key Takeaways
- A sentencing judge’s factual error (here, an unsupported inference of personal financial benefit) will not warrant appellate resentencing unless it had a material effect on the sentence actually imposed.
- When benchmarking a sentence for reckless money laundering against cases involving the knowing variant—which carries twice the maximum penalty—courts must account for the significant difference in moral culpability; a near-equivalent head sentence may itself signal manifest excess.
- Diagnosed cognitive and psychiatric conditions (here, ASD, PTSD, and depression) that the sentencing judge accepts as diminishing an offender’s insight into the consequences of her conduct reduce the weight properly given to general and personal deterrence, and this must be meaningfully reflected in the head sentence rather than treated as a factor merely moderating actual custody time.
- Elderly offenders with no criminal history who are exploited through online manipulation and whose offending is characterised as reckless rather than deliberate attract significant mitigation, even where the sums laundered are substantial and a prior police warning was issued.
Why It Matters
This decision provides important guidance for sentencing courts and practitioners in Queensland on the calibration of penalties across the reckless and knowing variants of money laundering. By holding that a three-year head sentence for reckless laundering of $450,000 was manifestly excessive when compared with three- and four-year sentences for the objectively more serious knowing offence involving larger sums, the Court of Appeal signals that the tiered maximum penalty structure under the Criminal Proceeds Confiscation Act 2002 must be given real and proportionate weight in fixing head sentences—not merely acknowledged in principle.
The decision also reinforces that accepted psychiatric and neurological findings going to moral culpability—particularly where the sentencing judge has explicitly found that an offender’s capacity to understand the impact of her conduct was impaired—must substantively reduce the sentence, and cannot be treated merely as a reason to shorten actual custody within an otherwise unchanged range. For practitioners advising clients who are elderly, vulnerable, or who have been exploited as unwitting money-mule participants, Lekic offers a useful precedent for arguing that both the head sentence and the period of actual custody should be moderated where diminished culpability is established.