Keanu Ryder: NAAJA uses taxpayer funds to appeal jail term for repeat DV offender who attacked woman

A taxpayer-funded Aboriginal legal service has backed a Supreme Court bid to cut the jail sentence of a repeat domestic violence offender who brutally attacked the same woman while subject to both a five-year non-contact order and a suspended jail sentence.

In February, Keanu Ryder was sentenced to an aggregate three year jail term for two aggravated assaults, breaching a domestic violence order and property damage over a violent attack on two women at Ali Curung in October last year. He was also convicted of resisting police but received no additional penalty for that offence.

The 25-year-old – who was named by AFLNT among Ali Curung’s best players during the 2025 Barkly Australian Football League season – had smashed a woman’s phone, hurled a frying pan into her head, thrown a 30cm kitchen knife at her and repeatedly kicked and punched her as she lay bleeding on the floor.

A second woman who tried to stop the attack was pushed to the ground twice.

At the time, Ryder was already serving a suspended sentence for two previous aggravated assaults on the same woman just months earlier.

He was sentenced to three years’ jail for the latest offending, with a further seven months and 27 days from the earlier suspended sentence added on.

Ryder later appealed against his sentence, arguing on other grounds that his punishment and two-year non-parole period were manifestly excessive.

North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency criminal defence lawyer Jonathan Cooper, acting for Ryder, also argued the Local Court had failed to properly deal with his guilty pleas and had not given reasons for setting a non-parole period slightly above 50 per cent of his total sentence.

But the appeal failed on every ground, with Northern Territory Supreme Court Justice Peter Barr this month declaring the three-year aggregate sentence imposed for Ryder’s latest offending was “far from being manifestly excessive” and “clearly not unreasonable or plainly unjust”.

Ryder’s latest offending occurred in the early hours of October 22 at a house where he and a woman identified in court documents only as CD were staying in the remote community of Ali Curung, almost 400km north of Alice Springs.

He was already subject to a confirmed “full non-contact” domestic violence order protecting CD.

The order, imposed five months earlier, prohibited Ryder from being in her company or presence for five years.

Despite that order, Ryder was with CD when a jealous argument erupted.

He grabbed her mobile phone and smashed its screen, leaving it unusable, before picking up a metal frying pan from the stove and hurling it at her.

The pan struck CD’s forehead, opening a two-to-three-centimetre wound that began “bleeding freely”.

Ryder then grabbed a 30cm kitchen knife and threw it towards her.

CD ducked and the knife struck the wall.

When another woman, PM, tried to block Ryder from reaching CD, he shoved her with both hands, causing her to slip on the wet floor and fall face down.

Ryder then ran towards CD, who was still on the ground bleeding from her head, kicked her twice and repeatedly punched her to the head and body.

One blow, delivered in what the court described as a “hammer-like motion”, struck CD’s left hand, causing swelling, pain and reduced movement.

During the attack, Ryder also removed the top CD was wearing.

When PM again tried to intervene, Ryder pushed her over backwards before fleeing the house.

In her victim impact statement, CD said she felt “very sad”.

PM told the court she was “shocked and scared” and had never seen anything like the attack before.

After Ryder fled, PM tried to help CD from the floor but she kept falling down.

CD was eventually taken to the Ali Curung police station and officers took her to the local clinic, where she required three stitches to her head wound and treatment to her injured hand.

When she attended Tennant Creek Hospital several days later, her hand remained swollen and painful and doctors suspected she had fractured two or three metacarpal bones.

Police later returned to the house and found Ryder attempting to hide underneath a kitchen bench.

He resisted officers before being restrained and taken to the Tennant Creek Watch House.

The Local Court imposed an aggregate three-year jail term for the assaults, DVO breach and property damage and convicted Ryder of resisting police without imposing any additional penalty.

Justice Barr said this was far from Ryder’s first violent offence or even his first attack on CD.

He had assaulted her on two successive days in April 2025 and was sentenced that June to concurrent 10-month jail terms.

After serving just over two months, the remainder of those sentences was suspended.

Ryder had been back in the community and subject to those suspended sentences for only four months when he again attacked CD in October.

In February, the Local Court restored the outstanding seven months and 27 days and ordered Ryder to serve it entirely on top of his fresh three-year term.

He was given a non-parole period of two years.

Justice Barr noted Ryder had also committed a male-on-female assault causing harm and breached a DVO in 2023, committed another male-on-female aggravated assault causing harm in 2022 and had been sentenced by the Supreme Court to a partly suspended three-year prison term for aggravated robbery in 2019.

Ryder challenged his latest sentence on three grounds.

The first was that the Local Court had failed to explain why his two-year non-parole period amounted to about 54 per cent of his total effective sentence when NT sentencing laws required reasons to be given for fixing a non-parole period above or below 50 per cent.

On that narrow point, Justice Barr agreed the sentencing judge had erred.

He found the Local Court had failed to give the specific reasons required by law for departing from the 50 per cent mark, but the error ultimately made no difference.

Justice Barr found it did not invalidate the non-parole period and rejected the first ground of appeal.

Ryder also argued his guilty pleas had not been properly taken into account, but they were not entered until February 5 – the day the case had been set down for trial.

Under NT sentencing laws then in force, a court could not reduce an offender’s sentence for a guilty plea entered within seven days of trial unless the offender established he could not have pleaded earlier.

Justice Barr found Ryder had failed to do so.

His final ground – that the aggregate sentence, restored suspended sentence and non-parole period were manifestly excessive – was emphatically rejected.

Justice Barr described the assault on CD as involving “jealous violence”, multiple acts of assault, “cruelty”, the use of weapons and persistence despite PM trying to intervene.

He assessed Ryder’s moral culpability as being in the medium-to-high range.

“Although the appellant was only 25 years old, he had a significant record of violent offending and had not apparently benefited from leniency shown to him in the past,” he said.

“His prospects for rehabilitation were guarded.”

The judge said the offending required punishment, denunciation and both general and specific deterrence.

Justice Barr calculated the individual sentences he considered appropriate for each offence.

He said three years would have been appropriate for the assault on CD, 12 months for assaulting PM, four months for breaching the DVO and another four months for destroying CD’s phone.

The judge described the destruction of a person’s ability to communicate as “malicious”, adding that in a remote community “it could also be dangerous in certain circumstances”.

The individual sentences totalled four years and eight months before allowing for overlap between the offences.

Justice Barr said only “generous allowances” for concurrency and “a most compassionate application” of the totality principle could “airbrush away” one year and eight months to reach the three-year aggregate sentence Ryder actually received.

“It follows from my analysis that the aggregate sentence of three years was far from being manifestly excessive,” he said.

“It was not outside the range of a reasonable discretionary judgment. It was clearly not unreasonable or plainly unjust.”

Justice Barr also found there was good reason for the remaining seven months and 27 days from Ryder’s earlier assaults on CD to be served entirely on top of the sentence imposed for attacking her again.

Ryder’s two-year non-parole period was also upheld.

The appeal was dismissed.

The failed challenge raises questions about how finite taxpayer-funded legal resources are allocated to sentence appeals involving repeat domestic violence offenders, at a time NAAJA itself has warned of mounting caseloads and financial pressure.

Last November, chief executive Ben Grimes warned the organisation expected to run a deficit after its criminal caseload surged by about 25 per cent following changes to NT bail and criminal laws without a corresponding increase in funding.

NAAJA did not respond to questions from The Nightly.