‘Gap it, bro, gap it’
A man who took a video of a crash in which four people died – and then edited out more than 20 seconds of footage before handing it in to police – has been sentenced to eight months of home detention.
Stephen John Jones, 21, was in the front passenger seat of the car codefendant Dylan Cossey was driving during a street race south of Hamilton which ended when the car they were racing smashed head-on into an oncoming van on June 24, 2016.
‘‘Gap it, bro, gap it,’’ he told Cossey, who sped off from the crash scene.
The pair stood trial in the High Court in Hamilton in February.
The jury found Cossey, 20, guilty of four counts of manslaughter, as well as causing injury to the van’s driver and failing to stop after an accident.
He was last month sentenced to 12 months of home detention, 400 hours of community work and disqualified from driving for seven years.
Jones was found not guilty on the manslaughter and injuring charges, but guilty of the failing to stop charge, and of perverting the course of justice, relating to his editing of the race footage.
Jones returned to the High Court on Thursday for sentencing before Justice Anne Hinton.
The race between the Honda Integra Cossey was driving and a Nissan Skyline driven by Lance Tyrone Robinson,
28, reached estimated speeds of more than 150kmh. It ended when the Nissan lost control while overtaking and collided with the van near Hamilton Airport about 10pm.
Robinson, Hannah Leis StrickettCraze, 24, and Paul de Silva, 20, all from Waipa, and Jason McCormick Ross, 19, from Taranaki, were killed. Jones’s decision to encourage Cossey to drive away was callous, Justice Hinton said.
‘‘It could not be considered for a second that they were not in dire need of assistance.’’ The video that Jones filmed of the crash and the moments leading up to it would have been invaluable to crash investigators, the judge said.
He had edited the original 38-second video down to 11 seconds before giving it to police. He subsequently gave them another version of the footage that was
13 seconds long. Because the perverting justice and the failing to stop charges represented two different kinds of offending, Justice Hinton calculated two sentences to be served cumulatively. On the perverting charge, she took a starting point of 18 months in prison. Mitigating factors such as Jones’s youth, previous good character and references supplied by his employer, mother and others resulted in a 40 per cent reduction, and applying the principle of totality knocked a further two months off.
That resulted in a nine-month prison sentence that Justice Hinton converted to four-and-a-half months of home detention.
She took an identical approach with the failing to stop charge, starting with 15 months in prison and ending with three-and-a-half months of home detention.
She referred to the letter Jones’S mother had submitted to the court, which described an ‘‘emotional toll’’ that the crash and the subsequent court process had taken. This included an inability to sleep, breaking down into tears and expressions of regret at the decision to leave the scene of the crash.
Crown prosecutor Duncan McWilliam had sought an 18-month imprisonment start point, while Jones’s counsel Russell Boot had called for 12 to 15 months. His editing of the video was ‘‘a misguided attempt to assist a friend’’ and was not malicious, Boot said.
McWilliam said Jones’s destruction of evidence was of equal culpability as someone who had perverted the course of justice by dissuading a witness from giving evidence.
‘‘It strikes at the heart of the criminal justice system. That evidence is lost forever.’’
Both Boot and McWilliam and the judge were united in their view of a presentence report recommending supervision and community work as inadequate. That report commended Jones because he had not displayed a sense of entitlement or any anti-authority attitudes. Speaking outside court after sentencing was completed, Tania Bowkett, the aunt of Strickett-Craze, described what had happened as ‘‘the final piece of a really nasty puzzle’’.
She believed that unlike Cossey, Jones had been well tutored by his lawyer and had comported himself well in the court setting.
‘‘He conducted in a way that was not offensive to us.’’