TWO MEN are set to find out their fates on Thursday for attacking a drug dealer with a crowbar over poor quality methamphetamine.
Scott Shane Papworth and Jacob William Crowe have fronted sentence hearings in Newcastle District Court after pleading guilty to reckless wounding in company.
Papworth, 37, has been behind bars since his arrest in the hours after the attack at Maitland in the early hours of August 27, 2022, and gave evidence in court on Wednesday.
He detailed his ongoing health battles stemming a separate incident where he was shot in the stomach in the driveway of an Aberglasslyn home in 2021.
He told the court he had done programs in prison and now realised how terrifying it would have been for his victim to have been struck in the head with the crowbar.
"I feel like he could have been experiencing trauma and everything like I have in the past from being shot ... and I feel very remorseful for doing something like that to someone," Papworth said.
"I'm a 37-year-old man that does need help and is ready to get help now."
He gave evidence that drugs had been a problem for him for a long time, but he wanted to get out of jail to be with his family and escape the "rat race" he had been living in.
"I want to change my future," he said.
Papworth had also pleaded guilty to supplying a prohibited drug, while drug possession charges and an offence of dealing with the proceeds of crime - $280 in cash - were to be taken into account at sentencing.
His defence lawyer Benjamin Bickford said there was an expectation that Papworth could be rehabilitated.
"He's not a hopeless case, in my submission," he told the court.
Judge Penny Hock warned that Papworth, as the main assailant, could not expect the same sentence as Crowe when she hands down her judgments in Newcastle District Court on February 29.
Crowe has been out on bail and his lawyer argued for an intensive corrections order to be imposed, which is a term of imprisonment served in the community.
The charges came after a drug dealer sold poor quality methamphetamine - cut with baking powder - to Crowe the day before the attack.
The dealer was smoking drugs in a Telarah home when Crowe and Papworth arrived in a ute and walked into the house.
Papworth, who was armed with a crowbar, held the bag of methamphetamine in front of the dealer and said he had "ripped off" Crowe.
He then hit the dealer in the head with the crowbar and told the dealer at the end of the assault, "you f***ed up".
