An Irish man has been sentenced to up to a year in jail for a drunken attack on a bouncer at a city centre bar in Sydney.
Diarmaid Dooley (28) was sentenced to a minimum of eight months in jail for the assault at Scruffy Murphys Irish bar on November 10th last.
Magistrate Jane Culver issued the sentence after the viewing security footage which showed Mr Dooley punching the bouncer in the face and kneeing him in the stomach.
Mr Dooley pleaded guilty to a charge of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, but told the court he had been drunk at the time and had no memory of the incident.
Ms Culver said the court had to send a strong message that drunken violence will not be tolerated.
“This is a crime that involves intoxication and violence on the streets of Sydney,” she said.
Mr Dooley's lawyer told a local television channel that his client was "devastated" by the sentence and that it was a different type of case to other random assaults dominating news headlines in Australia.
“It was not an unprovoked ‘king hit’ on an innocent person,” he said, but added that the sentence was “not a surprise given the current situation”.
Unexpected one-punch assaults to the head, commonly called “king hits”, have killed more than 90 people in Australia since 2000, with alcohol being a factor in three-quarters of these deaths.
An Australian Bureau of Statistics survey shows that six in every 100 Australian males aged between 15 and 24 were physically assaulted in the past 12 months.
Most of these assaults were committed by people under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs.
Mr Dooley will return to court next month to appeal his sentence.
