A COWARDLY murderer who used his two-tonne four-wheel-drive to run down a defenceless father-of-six at the Cessnock tip wants his jail term reduced, claiming he only intended to hit the man with his car and not run him over.
Adam Andrew Bidner, now 35, of Aberdare, used his Toyota Landcruiser to reverse into and over rival Shane Mears while he had his back turned and the pair were scavenging for scrap metal at the Cessnock Waste Management Centre on the afternoon of July 5, 2020.
Justice Helen Wilson had found Bidner must have intended to kill Mr Mears when he reversed over him and found he was not provoked into the attack or truly remorseful for taking the 54-year-old's life.
He faced a hearing in the Court of Criminal Appeal on Wednesday, during which his barrister, Bill Neild, SC, argued Justice Wilson had erred in finding Bidner had intended to kill Mr Mears when he hit him with his car.
Mr Nield said the evidence was not capable of excluding the alternative hypothesis that Bidner only intended to hit Mr Mears with the Landcruiser and not run him over, meaning his intention could have been not to kill Mr Mears but to cause him grievous bodily harm.
Mr Nield also argued Justice Wilson had made an error in failing to find that Bidner's drug use and upbringing had played a causal role in the murder, arguing he had a background of profound disadvantage and had been using drugs since his early teens.
Justice Wilson had questioned much of Bidner's claims about his upbringing during the sentence proceedings and ultimately did not accept that his background and drug use had any causal role to play in the crime.
Prosecutors argued on Wednesday that it was "clearly open on all of the evidence" for Justice Wilson to find that Bidner had intended to kill Mr Mears when he drove into and then over him.
Bidner and Mr Mears had been involved in an ongoing feud for more than a year before Mr Mears was callously run down and left for dead.
The feud and "ongoing animosity" between Bidner and Mr Mears stemmed from an altercation between Bidner and one of Mr Mears' friends in April, 2019, during which Bidner struck Mr Mears' friend six times with a pick axe handle.
The altercation was filmed and the video circulated around Cessnock before Mr Mears saw it and became furious with Bidner.
After Mr Mears had offered to fight Bidner a number of times over the next 12 months, the feud came to a head inside the Cessnock tip.
Using bushtracks and holes in the fence, Bidner, Mr Mears and four others had snuck into the tip after hours on the afternoon of July 5, 2020, to scavenge for scrap metal.
No one saw what happened, but at some point Bidner deliberately reversed his Landcruiser at Mr Mears, striking him from behind, knocking him to the ground and then driving up and over his body until one tyre was resting on his shoulder and neck.
Justice Helen Wilson found the pair both being there on that afternoon was entirely coincidental and Bidner had decided to "spontaneously and opportunistically" run over Mr Mears before the pair had even spoken a word to each other.
Justice Wilson found there was no evidence Mr Mears even knew Bidner was at the tip before he was reversed over and had not provoked the attack, finding the history of animosity provided a background to the attack but did not mitigate it.
Mr Mears's friend found him lying face down in the dirt with a tyre track across his back at 5.03pm and called for help.
Meanwhile, Bidner was speeding away and putting in place a plan to avoid being implicated in Mr Mears' death.
He cleaned his car, changed the tyres and even offered his sympathy to Mr Mears' daughter for the loss of her father.
After he was charged, Bidner claimed he was unfit to stand trial because he had a cognitive impairment but was found to be malingering.
He also tried to use his Aboriginality and upbringing to help mitigate his sentence. And now he is appealing the length of his jail term, claiming he never intended to kill the man he ran over.
The three-panel judge of the Court of Criminal Appeal reserved their judgment.
