A teenager convicted of dangerous driving after a friend riding in the back of a ute was seriously injured in a "fishtailing" incident has had part of his sentence revoked.
In May, an 18-year-old male who cannot be named for legal reasons pleaded guilty in the Children's Court at Rockhampton to dangerously operating a motor vehicle causing grievous bodily harm.
Court documents reveal the teenager, then 17, got behind the wheel of a utility and drove dangerously, fishtailing around a vacant lot with two children in the ute's tray.
The ute vehicle rolled, pinning the male high school student who suffered a collapsed lung, internal bleeding and two fractured vertebrae.
After an early guilty plea, the driver was sentenced to a restorative justice order, as well as nine months' probation with no conviction recorded.
But the driver's legal defence launched an appeal in the Supreme Court, contending the sentence imposed was "manifestly excessive".
"In the present case the offending, while serious, was an isolated instance of immature recklessness," the driver's defence told the court.
The defence argued the sentencing judge erred in making the restorative justice order a condition of probation.
"[The] Youth Justice Act requires that when a restorative justice order and another sentence order are made for a single offence, they must be made as separate orders rather than one being imposed as a requirement of the other," the defence argued.
"It would therefore have been an error if his honour had made an order in which a restorative justice order was a condition of a probation order or vice versa.
"There was obvious merit in the child being forced to meaningfully confront the grave consequences of his recklessness via the restorative justice process.
"It is not apparent how a probation order was additionally apt to the circumstances.
"The offending had no connection with some broader issue, such as drug abuse, a psychological problem or a drift into repetitive offending, of the kind which often prompts the making of a probation order on sentence."
The appeal was granted and the probation order was set aside.
