One of two Canberra men who boasted about bashing Asians before murdering a Chinese student has been sentenced to 17 years' jail.

Liang Zhao, 27, was beaten to death with a baseball bat and a machete, and robbed of his mobile phone and $21, as he was walking home along Canberra's Northbourne Avenue in August 2011.

Mr Zhao had decided to walk home from the Jolimont Centre in Civic after arriving on a bus from Melbourne at 4:00am. A passerby found his body at day break.

The attack was so brutal that the victim's skull was broken and crushed, and the brain exposed. He also had multiple incised wounds to his head and arms.

A 19-year-old man, who cannot be named because he was a juvenile at the time, and Taylor Lewis Schmidt, 22, pleaded guilty to the murder earlier this year.

Today in the ACT Supreme Court, Acting Chief Justice Richard Refshauge sentenced the 19-year-old to 17 years' jail.

But under ACT law he will be released after 10 years and six months, and placed on a six-and-a-half-year good-behaviour order.

In sentencing, Acting Chief Justice Refshauge described the attack as "unprovoked, cowardly, brutal, indescribably vicious and ultimately fatal."

He said he reduced the young murderer's sentence by 10 per cent because he had pleaded guilty before a trial.

But he said, for the victim's family, "no sentence that this court can impose will make good the loss they have suffered."

Mr Zhao's mother, Giufu Min, was in court and visibly distressed during the sentencing.

In her native China, the murderer would have been executed for the offence.

A sentencing hearing for Schmidt will begin at the end of the month.