Con artist in greatest escape yet

She stole millions, then fleeced a pensioner. Now a notorious fraudster has escaped without a jail sentence because prosecutors didn’t check her criminal record, reports Kelly Dennett.

An accomplished fraudster has now pulled off the ultimate swindle: she’s escaped a jail term after the court failed to see through her fake identities.

Lisa Donnelly had pleaded guilty to fleecing a 92-year-old woman of her life savings.

Judge Christopher Field sentenced her to home detention when she appeared in the Auckland District Court. He cut her some slack because, he said, she had led a relatively crime-free life.

But he was never told of previous convictions she’d racked up under multiple aliases. As Lisa Clement, she infamously defrauded the Ministry of Social Development of $1.9 million at the same time as she collected $14,000 in benefits.

She had also racked up more than 40 other convictions between her three aliases.

Media reports when she was first caught in 2003 said Clement ‘‘failed spectacularly’’ to conceal her fraud and her resulting extravagant lifestyle.

Among the bizarre purchases found stashed in her Wainuiomata home were a model rainbow trout, 54 statuettes of cats, assorted James Bond cosmetics, a Barbie & Bond two-figure boxed set, a Holden wall clock and a radio-controlled model Aston Martin. She was jailed for more than five years.

But this week the prosecutor and the judge were oblivious to her fraudulent alter egos.

The victim’s family is ‘‘gobsmacked’’ at the courtroom blunder and resulting lenient sentence.

Police are now investigating why their prosecutor was unaware of Donnelly’s history, despite it having been headline news around New Zealand.

Earlier this year, Donnelly pleaded guilty to dishonestly using the bank card of the senior Waiheke Island woman whose home she visited regularly as a care assistant with the Waiheke Health Trust. In 2015 she got hold of the victim’s eftpos card and siphoned out $36,000.

Judge Field said the offending was aggravated by the vulnerability of the victim, but he sentenced Donnelly to just 150 hours’ community work and seven months’ home detention.

He said reports provided to him showed she had a history of dishonesty pre-1992. But Judge Field said that didn’t warrant a heavier sentence.

After the sentencing, Donnelly’s lawyer, Adam Couchman, brought the matter back after realising neither the prosecution nor the judge were aware of her significant criminal history.

But Judge Field declined to resentence

It’s a really big oversight and frankly it’s not good enough. Claudine Crabtree Victim’s grand-daughter

Donnelly, saying he did not want to ‘‘tinker’’ with the original sentence.

Couchman said Donnelly’s criminal convictions were encapsulated in a pre-sentence report written by Probation Services, but believed it was the responsibility of police, not the defence, to ensure the court had the relevant information.

‘‘I can certainly say the Probation Services were in the clear, they had all the correct information. It’s the police that didn’t have the correct information. The question is, would it have made a difference? I don’t think so.’’

He believed home detention would still have been available to Donnelly, although the prosecutor told Judge Field at the time that given Donnelly’s history, they would have argued for a higher starting point that would have seen her become ineligible for home detention.

The Ministry of Justice confirmed it is the role of police prosecution services to ensure all details relating to a defendant were before the court.

Auckland City Police prosecutions manager Sergeant Martin Cahill said police were looking into why they were not aware of the alias, and whether to appeal. ‘‘When forming a prosecution case police use verified identification information such as fingerprints, photographs and DNA to establish whether someone has an alias,’’ he said.

The Waiheke victim’s granddaughter, Claudine Crabtree, said the family was ‘‘bloody disappointed’’ with the outcome, with any appeal likely to drag out for months.

‘‘We were gobsmacked that all her history hadn’t come to light,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s a really big oversight and frankly it’s not good enough.’’