the inadequate way the evidence was presented to the court. On 19 March 1990 Wilson was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for assaulting Leigh. Charges were initially laid against Webster for sexual assault, though by the time the case went to trial they had been dropped without public explanation. Hillary Byrne-Armstrong, writing in The Australian Feminist Law Journal, stated it was likely that Webster was offered a plea bargain that would drop the lesser charges in exchange for his guilty plea for murder. Webster pleaded guilty to Leigh's murder on 24 October 1990. The guilty plea meant that no witnesses were called for the trial; Detective Chaffey instead read a list of facts to the court. Justice James Roland Wood sentenced Webster to a minimum of 14 years in prison, with an additional six years during which he would be eligible for parole, saying that a life sentence was inappropriate in view of Webster's potential to be rehabilitated. Wood found that Webster's motivation for killing Leigh was his fear she would report his sexual assault. Five Stockton citizens volunteered to give character evidence at his trial, describing the teenager as a quiet "gentle giant" from a good family. Others expressed amazement at this description of Webster, who was also known as "fat Matt, the thug of Stockton". Webster served his sentence at Parklea Correctional Centre. While acknowledging that plea bargains such as the one Webster was probably offered are common and help avoid expensive and time-consuming trials, Byrne-Armstrong stated that accepting Webster's confession helped create a legal fiction that he unquestionably acted alone in both sexually assaulting and murdering Leigh. The actual level of sexual violence that Leigh sustained was accordingly, she said, "all but erased" from the sentencing, and it appeared Justice Wood had only been given the limited information from the post-mortem report that would have corroborated Webster's confession. Webster was the first person in New South Wales to be sentenced under the "truth in sentencing" legislation, which meant he could not be released under any circumstances before the end of his 14-year non-parole period; under the previous legislation a person of Webster's age would probably have been released after only nine years. Webster appealed the length of his prison term to the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal, where Justices Gleeson, Lee and Allen dismissed his appeal in July 1992. In their view the crime was