A CONVICTED murderer who was caught dealing drugs at his kitchen table has been given two-and-a-half years in jail.
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However, Epsom 54-year-old Kevin James Taylor - in 1974 perhaps the last Victorian to get the death sentence before the law changed - could be out of jail in less than a year after pleading guilty to trafficking amphetamines and possessing cannabis.
County Court Judge Pamela Jenkins set Taylor's non-parole period at 18 months and said he had already served 215 days in pre-sentence detention.
She sentenced him after seeing police video footage from a surveillance camera hidden above the kitchen table at Taylor's Midland Highway home.
The videos showed that Taylor did 39 drug deals in 25 days in 2004, often with his wife and eight-year-old daughter at the table.
"It beggars belief that on one hand you purport to hold yourself out to be a loving and devoted father and husband, and on the other hand you have directly exposed both females in your life to the evil and destructive trade of drug trafficking."
Taylor was collecting pension benefits and child support payments at the time police began Operation Luxes to track his drug trafficking.
Police tapped his telephone and put a tracking device in his Chevrolet utility, and began their video surveillance soon after the family returned from a holiday in Bali.
Bendigo Regional Response Unit raided the home on October 25, finding almost $20,000 in cash.
Judge Jenkins said the trafficking activity was regular and business-like, suggesting the hardened criminal did not appreciate how serious his offences were.
"You almost make it sound as if you were conducting a benevolent enterprise.
"In fact there is little if any evidence that you have any understanding or comprehension of the seriousness of your offending conduct.
"Trafficking a drug of dependence is always a very serious offence. The human misery perpetuated by drug traffickers, such as you, is incalculable.
"The consequences of your evil trade may not be readily apparent to you sitting at your kitchen table dealing out your doses of poison, but they are grimly apparent every day in courts, hospitals, psychiatric facilities - which are overburdened with the human wreckage which drug trafficking inevitably produces."
Detailing Taylor's many prior convictions, Judge Jenkins said the man had become familiar with jail in the early 1970s, while still in his teens.
"Whilst in prison you made certain contacts and after release you were charged and ultimately convicted of a contract murder.
"Whilst in prison you were charged and acquitted of another murder, and also charged of inciting a riot within H Division."
The murder conviction in the Supreme Court in 1974 made Taylor one of the last people to be sentenced to the death penalty in Victoria.
"Only after changes to the law was sentence commuted to life and you were subsequently given a non-parole period and released on life parole after serving 16 years," Judge Jenkins said.
Taylor was also fined $500 on the charge of possessing cannabis.
