July 22, 2010 5:48pm by David Farrar

Getting off lightly

North Canterbury farmer Mark Stafford Feary has been fined $20,000 after being found guilty of threatening to kill the Prime Minister.

Judge Raoul Neave said he was not sending Feary to prison because he had “no intention of making a martyr of him”.

Feary, who calls himself All Means All, had threatened to go on a hunger strike if he was jailed.

The 53-year-old was found guilty in June of 14 charges of threatening to kill or cause grievous bodily harm to the Prime Minister and government officials.

It followed a long-running battle with officials over a 1780-hectare Mt Oxford farm that has been in his family since the 1920s.

His threats included a fax sent in February last year to Key saying “it’s killing time” and threatening letters sent by post to Wellington between September and December 2008.

Feary told the jury his family, including two teenage children, knew that if sent to jail he would not eat “the corrupt government’s food and I will not drink the corrupt government’s water”.

Does he also refuse to drive on the corrupt Government’s roads?

During its deliberations, the jury had returned to court to ask a question about Feary’s state of mind. The judge told them there was no doubt about his fitness to plead, and he did not fall foul of the Criminal Procedures (Mentally Impaired Persons) Act provisions.

In others words, not nuts enough.