The review asked the wrong questions
The Herald reports:
The Parole Board’s decision to release convicted killer Paul Wilson was a reasonable one, despite him going on to kill again, an independent review has concluded.
Paul Russell Wilson, aka Paul Pounamu Tainui, 55, was today jailed at the High Court in Christchurch for life with a minimum non-parole period of 28 years for murdering Nicole Marie Tuxford, 27, in Christchurch last year while on life parole – 24 years after he killed former girlfriend Kimberly Schroder in Hokitika.
The shocking case prompted the Parole Board to commission an independent review of its involvement with Wilson who was released on parole in 2011 — after being denied an early release four times previously.
Both the Tuxford and Schroder families have slammed the decision to allow Wilson back into the community.
The review was carried out by Devon Polaschek, a distinguished forensic clinical psychologist, professor of psychology, and joint director of the New Zealand Institute of Security and Crime Science, University of Waikato.
In findings released today, Polaschek concluded that the decision to grant Wilson parole was “a reasonable one”.
A reasonable one possibly, but also a disastrously wrong one.
Offenders whose convictions include a single, relationship-related homicide, but who have little criminal history otherwise, pose some challenges for decision-makers, she noted.
“It is well understood in the international research literature that those who murder a current or former intimate partner with few or no previous convictions for other types of offending are very unlikely to be reconvicted in a similar way, or at all,” said Polaschek, a former Fulbright scholar.
New Zealand data going back to 1972 found that the likelihood of a person convicted of a homicide being convicted of a second homicide following parole was in the region of 0.4 per cent.
That is the wrong question. Of course double murderers are very rare. The data that is more pertinent is how many people convicted of homicide, go on to commit any sort of further violent offence once released?