A NARINGAL man who brutally choked his partner after a “booze cruise” through country pubs has abandoned his appeal against a 16-month jail sentence.
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Clement Reid Rhyne, 42, of Panmure Road, was sentenced in the Warrnambool Magistrates Court in May last year after strangling a woman while whipping her with a phone charger.
He appealed against the conviction and sentence and the matter was heard in the Warrnambool County Court last week.
The charges were again found proven and a highly agitated Rhyne then abandoned his appeal against the severity of his 16-month jail sentence.
He will have to serve eight months before being eligible for parole. Extra police were called into court before the case was finalised and Rhyne taken into custody.
A court previously heard Rhyne and his then girlfriend spent the afternoon and evening of January 24 last year travelling between pubs in Allansford, Boggy Creek and Panmure.
About midnight the pair arrived home at a dairy farm where Rhyne was living.
The victim, a mother of four, told the court she feared for her life during the attack.
“He grabbed me by the collar and slammed me down ... he choked me three times until I lost my breath – I thought he was going to kill me,” she said.
The victim fled to a nearby farm property where she stole a car and drove to a relative’s house in Warrnambool, reporting the assault to police the next day.
A magistrate and a judge both refused to accept Rhyne’s version of events – that the victim injured herself by running through bushland and broken farm machinery after he refused to share his Valium tablets.
The magistrate previously described the attack as “a severe beating”. The offending breached two suspended jail sentences.
In an unrelated matter also pertaining to domestic violence, a former Warrnambool man has been fined $1500 for throwing his partner to the ground.
Gerard Diaz, 40, now of James Street, Dandenong, pleaded guilty in the Warrnambool Magistrates Court after he was involved in an altercation with a woman in February last year. Diaz and his now former partner had been drinking when he threw her to the ground, causing bruising. The woman’s 13-year-old son was present. Diaz has undertaken a parenting course which led to the magistrate convicting and fining him.