A pair of prisoners have expressed their affection for each other after being found guilty of viciously bashing a fellow inmate, with one wasting little time in revealing his disdain for the verdict.
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"I'm appealing this shit, anyway. F--- it," Brendon Walters announced to the ACT Magistrates Court via audio-visual link from the Alexander Maconochie Centre on Thursday morning.
"Love ya, bruz," he told co-offender Cedric Roberts, who returned the compliment while putting on a green cap and leaving a remote room at Goulburn's jail.
Special magistrate Jane Campbell, who had moments earlier found the pair guilty of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, laughed as she asked: "Where's the love for me?"
Roberts and Walters, still firm friends despite the distance now between them, were incarcerated together at Canberra's jail when they put a fellow inmate in intensive care in December 2018.
As she found prosecutor James Melloy had proven the pair's guilt, Ms Campbell said on Thursday that Walters had argued with the victim about a tattoo gun just prior to the incident.
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Still infuriated following the clash, Walters charged into the victim's cell and ranted about the man treating him "like a gronk".
Walters then grabbed the top of a bunk bed and swung upwards, kicking the victim in the head.
Roberts, who had followed his mate into the cell, stomped on the victim before both offenders hauled the man off his bed and continued to trample him on the floor.
The victim ended up spending nearly a week in hospital, with the first few nights of his stay spent in an intensive care unit.
His injuries were such that, as Ms Campbell put it, he had "absolutely no memory" of the incident.
But the attack was witnessed by Rhys Dugdale, who was the victim's cellmate at the time in question.
Throughout a prolonged hearing, which began in March, Roberts' defence barrister Jason Moffett and Walters' lawyer, Andrew Byrnes, tried to convince Ms Campbell it was in fact Dugdale who had perpetrated the assault.
If not him, they argued, it was perhaps another of the many inmates who were captured on CCTV footage going in and out of the victim's cell around the time in question.
But on Thursday, Ms Campbell said she had narrowed down the window for the attack to a short period in which only Roberts, Walters and Dugdale had been inside the cell with the victim.
She found that Dugdale, who died not long after giving evidence in August, was not responsible and that he had given an honest and reliable account of what had gone on.
Dugdale told the court Roberts and Walters were to blame, with his credibility boosted by the fact he had reluctantly named the pair despite "snitching" being frowned upon in the criminal world.
"This has tarnished my name for the rest of my life," Dugdale said during his testimony.
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Both Roberts, 23, and Walters, 27, rested their heads on tables, seemingly resigned to their fates, towards the end of the hour or so it took Ms Campbell to read out her findings.
The pair will appear in court again for the start of their sentence proceedings on February 15 next year.
Roberts, who was transferred to Goulburn following a string of violent incidents in Canberra's jail, will also be sentenced for a series of other offences he committed in custody prior to his move.
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