Are the kids alright?
Jono Galuszka looks back at the year that was inside Manawatu’s courtrooms.
Youth Court is a place rarely seen by most Manawatu¯ people. Closed to the public, its hearings are held on a different level of the Palmerston North courthouse to almost all other matters, with no massive benches or dock for the defendants.
Until 2017, I could count the number of times I had attended Youth Court on one hand.
But 2017 saw me spend hours in a court where judges refer to defendants by their first name, and ask them to speak about their hopes and dreams for the future.
Usually I would not bother with Youth Court hearings, but that changed after the city suffered a spate of aggravated robberies, many of them allegedly involving youths.
It felt like there was a dairy or bottle shop being hit every other week at one stage, with gangs of balaclava-wearing men rushing off with cigarettes, cash and booze.
One was said to have had a gun when he committed a robbery.
It was especially tragic to see twins Klexus and Kalias Stevens-fraser sentenced less than a week apart for taking part in different aggravated robberies.
They celebrated their 18th birthdays in custody.
But the most disturbing court matter involving youths in 2017 had to be the case of four young men – Lou William Harrison, Meha Hemi Taylor-haeata, Renee Chaz Haeata and Anthony Simon Hirawani – who gang raped a teenage girl at a party.
Harrison was 15 at the time he and the others trapped her in a room and, at various times, violated her in terrifying, awful ways.
What was especially shocking was hearing how many of the rapists fell into drug and alcohol abuse at young ages.
One could have been defined an alcoholic by the time he was 10. Another was homeless and using various hard drugs, including methamphetamine, by the time he was 15.
It looks so stark when you see it on a page. But it becomes very real when you see these young men behind the glass of the dock in Palmerston North’s Courtroom 1, their families packing out the public gallery.
And then you leave court. And those family members accost you in the street. And they tell you their boy is, despite the horrors you just heard, a good lad.
How do you even react to that? Rage? Sympathy? A quickening of pace?
I would often have flashbacks to a conversation I had with Judge Gregory Ross, who died in August, while seeing all those young men enter and exit court.
He spent much of his nearly-25 years as a judge in Palmerston North sitting in Youth Court, and said the youths who ‘graduate’ to commit crimes as an adult do so ‘‘predictably’’.
Background played a big part in youths committing serious crimes, with a lack of a mentor or solid family links playing a big part, he said.
Is that all these kids need – some love and attention? Judge Lance Rowe certainly said as much to the families of those four rapists.
‘‘Your pro-social and proactive support will be instrumental in helping them to move on with their lives [when they are released].
‘‘It is the future of these four young men that is at stake.’’
If only they, and all the other young men I saw in court this year, got that kind of support before it was too late.