Mal Meninga opens home to killer brother on parole

NRL legend Mal Meninga has offered to have his jailed brother, a convicted murderer, live in his Brisbane family home if he were released on parole.

Bevan Meninga has served 21 years after bashing to death a 19-year-old woman with a tree branch on the Sunshine Coast in 1991.

Bevan has been eligible for parole since 2005 but has been kept in jail and has been waiting since January last year for a decision on his ¬latest application, the Courier-Mail reports.

He has now gone to court to force the Queensland Parole Board to make a decision.

According to his latest release plan, filed in the Queensland Supreme Court, Bevan said his brother Mal had offered to move him and their mother to Brisbane after an initial period of community reintegration at their mother's home on the Sunshine Coast.

A probation and parole officer last year assessed Mal's home for suitability.

The former Australian test captain and current coach of the Queensland State of Origin team wrote in a letter to the parole board in 2012 that he "supported Bevan by phone, letters and visits over the term of his incarceration and have kept a keen interest in his welfare''.

"I believe family support is so invaluable, regardless of his wrongdoing … the family love, respect and support is paramount to his reintegration," the letter said.

The board has said it is concerned Bevan, who claimed he was intoxicated at the time of the 1991 murder, could reoffend if he returned to alcohol or drug abuse.

He is being held at a low-security ¬prison farm in southeast Queensland.

Source: Courier-Mail

Author: Erin Tennant, Approving editor: Natasha Lee