Murder sentence

By Casey Neill
A Supreme Court jury last Friday found him guilty of murdering his friend, Montrose man Tim Fleming, during an argument over drugs on 26 July last year.
The 29-year-old bricklayer will face a hearing on 24 November that will decide his penalty.
Hamilton last week told the court he “freaked out” after shooting Mr Fleming in the neck with a shotgun in what he claimed was a scare tactic gone wrong.
He met Mr Fleming, 33, in late 2008, when Mr Fleming responded to an advertisement for his car.
“We become good friends. We done up cars together,” Hamilton said.
On the night of the murder, Mr Fleming returned to Hamilton’s Elizabeth Street home with a bag of speed Hamilton had given him earlier in the evening.
“And he started talking to me aggressively. Threw it at me and hit me in the chest. He said he was disgusted and it was s…,” Hamilton said.
“I seen him, his left hand go towards his pocket.”
Hamilton leapt from the couch and punched Mr Fleming in the mouth.
“Because I thought he was going to pull a weapon out,” he said.
Hamilton said he told Mr Fleming to “get out of the house” and picked up a samurai sword to scare him when he did not respond.
He struck him on his right shoulder but Mr Fleming still did not move, so Hamilton went into his bedroom “to grab a shotgun”.
“Because I just wanted to scare him to get out of the house,” he said.
Hamilton said he was minding the gun for his mum’s boyfriend, had never used a shotgun before and did not know it was loaded.
He said Mr Fleming started to stand up when he pointed the gun at him, knocked the gun and it discharged.
He threw the gun to a friend who was a witness in the case and “told him to get out of there”, gave the gun’s bag to witness Ray Ablett and took his then-girlfriend Alicia Wilson to her car.
“As I’ve walked inside I’ve walked over and seen Tim, I broke out into hysterics,” he said.
Hamilton soon called triple-zero and lied about what had taken place. “Because if I told the truth about what really happened no-one would believe me,” he said.
“If I was so angry I would have attacked him with a Samurai sword …and not went and got the gun to scare him.”
Hamilton’s barrister Campbell Thomson said the death was “a tragic accident”.
“If Marc Hamilton wanted to kill Tim Fleming do you really think he would have taken a shotgun and intentionally killed him in his own living room, in front of his girlfriend, with two mates only a few metres away leaving blood splattered all over the wall?”
Mr Thomson said ballistics expert Sergeant Mark Chandler had testified that the gun “could be discharged involuntarily if you had your finger on the trigger and someone knocked the barrel up”.
He said witness testimony that Hamilton said “this one’s for you” before the gunshot was concocted.
But prosecutor Mark Rochford said witness accounts of Hamilton saying “this one’s for you” proved his intention was to kill or seriously injure Mr Fleming.
“He was angry. He was upset. His anger got the better of him and he acted on it,” he said.