The outcry over home detention for multiples rapes grows

The victims of the rapist who got nine months home detention have spoken out. It is a hard read, as their lives have been torn apart by what happened to them, and now this laughable sentence.

There have also been protests around the country, all aghast that someone guilty of violating five under age teenagers got little more than a slap on the hand.

In response to this the Tauranga prosecutor has explained why she did not seek a jail term. But I will detail why her reasoning is (in my opinion) so incredibly flawed.

First of all be aware that rape is a very serious offence. The maximum term is 20 years and the Court of Appeal has stated that even the least serious rapes should have a starting point of six to eight years (for a single rape).

This afternoon, Tauranga’s Crown Solicitor Anna Pollett defended the sentence, explaining that a “rehabilitative approach is to protect the community in the long term from re-offending.”

“In the circumstances of this prosecution, and in careful consideration of all the available material, the Crown did not oppose a sentence of home detention to balance the need for accountability and deterrence while also maximising the opportunity for intensive rehabilitation of the young person,” Pollett said, in a rare statement from a Crown Solicitor.

Now this statement would be defensible if the defendent had only raped one person, pleaded guilty, was remorseful and not seen as likely to reoffend. If this was the case, I would absolutely agree that you don’t send him to prison.

But in this case, there were five separate victims and he was guilty of four separate rapes and four sexual violations. This is not a case of a young person making an extremely bad judgement call once. This guy was, beyond doubt, a predator.

He did not plead guilty. He forced his victims through a trial. You normally get a large sentence reduction (up to 25%) if you plead guilty. He did not.

He has now shown remorse. The victims think he is not remorseful. There are reports his family are not remorseful either and see him as the victim. The Corrections report found he was minimising what he had done.

And he is likely to reoffend. He is deemed at medium risk of raping again. That means they have assessed the probability that he will rape again within the next five years as being between 30% and 70%.

When you consider all the circumstances, it is clearly wrong that the Crown Prosecutor agreed not to seek a jail term. This is even worse than the Judge making a bad decision, because they can be appealed. But when the Crown Prosecutor doesn’t even seek a jail term, they can hardly then turn around and appeal it.