But as he conceded later in court he had “been awake for two weeks” and using crystal methylamphetamine (ice) before events on January 24, 2016, and tested positive for methylamphetamine and amphetamine when arrested.

McLeod appealed his five-year jail sentence, with a minimum term of two years and eight months, as “manifestly excessive”. But the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal thought otherwise in a decision this month, saying McLeod’s run from the police at 8am on that day could have ended “catastrophically”, and his invasion of a Lake Macquarie house on a Sunday morning was “particularly invasive” of the woman owner’s right to feel secure in her home.

McLeod was a disqualified driver in a car taken without the owner’s consent when he was stopped by police at Gateshead. He gave police a false name and accelerated away.

McLeod drove at 100 kilometres per hour in a 50 zone, crossed double white lines, drove on the wrong side of the road, failed to stop for a red light or at a pedestrian crossing, and continued speeding for some time while police terminated their pursuit a number of times due to the danger to the public.

McLeod eventually mounted a gutter and drove the car into bush before running from police pursuing him on foot.

He broke fence panels and ran in the back door of a Lake Macquarie home, assaulted the woman owner, pushed her outside and locked the door where she was left “extremely upset and frightened” because McLeod was in the house where her daughter, 14, was asleep.

McLeod climbed into the ceiling space and from there to the roof, damaging a manhole and roof tiles in the process. He refused to climb down after police arrived but was eventually “assisted”. Police found a large kitchen knife in the car McLeod had been driving.

“Taken as a whole, the conduct of (McLeod) constituted a significant endangerment of, and intrusion upon, other members of the community,” three judges of the Court of Criminal Appeal said in a decision this month.

His dangerous driving from police “was particularly selfish, and could have been catastrophic”, the court said.

Events at the woman’s home were “particularly invasive of the right to security of others in their own home, and certainly must have been terrifying”.

McLeod, 36, argued the sentencing judge failed to consider his deprived background when assessing his moral culpability. The court heard he was raised by a drug-taking petty dealer father who introduced his son to alcohol and drugs at age nine. McLeod’s first offences as a juvenile occurred a year later and included armed robbery and robbery in company before he was 18.

His extensive adult criminal history included drug-related offences, having custody of a knife in public, multiple stalk and intimidate offences, theft and possession of an unauthorised firearm. McLeod’s father died of a drug overdose in 2014.

McLeod was on an intensive correction order and a bond when he committed the January 24, 2016 offences.

The Court of Criminal Appeal rejected that the sentencing judge had failed to take into account McLeod’s background, and noted the judge’s extensive comments about his childhood.

“One can accept that this man has been bedevilled by a problem with prohibited drugs for many years; that that problem in turn developed from psychological difficulties arising from the way he was treated as a child, through no fault at all of his own; that he had accepted responsibility for all that he had done on this occasion; that he is a person of intelligence and potential; and that he did and does sincerely wish to get help,” the appeal court said.

But the sentence was appropriate for the offences and was not excessive, it concluded.

McLeod’s earliest release date is February, 2019.