Sentence upheld

A Ha¯wera man who was twice convicted of blackmailing young women using indecent photographs has had his prison sentence reduced on appeal. Jacob Kirby-Parker, 26, was convicted in August for blackmailing a 15-year-old girl while he was serving nine months’ home detention for a previous similar offence. He was jailed for two years by Judge Chris Sygrove. In both offences Kirby-Parker had used email and social media to separately blackmail two young women into sending him indecent photographs of themselves. He had also sent indecent photographs of himself. When the complainant in the latter offending stopped sending images he had threatened to show the photos to her family.

In September Kirby-Parker appealed to the High Court that Sygrove had not considered the time he had spent in home detention when sentencing him. It was also argued the wrong starting point for sentencing was used and there were excessive uplifts. In a High Court judgement released this week, KirbyParker, 26, had the sentence of two years jail reduced to 19 months. The High Court upheld the appeal because of an error of double counting Kirby-Parker’s previous offending while on home detention. Under the conditions of his appeal, Kirby Parker has been ordered to attend a child sex offender programme when released, not associate with the victims, or anyone under 16 unless supervised, and to not use a device to access images.