Appeal against jail term denied
A MOSGIEL woman who stole $65,000 from two vulnerable family members has had a bid to avoid a jail term rejected.
Judith Gale McMahon (52) was sentenced to two years behind bars after admitting three counts of theft — $35,810 from her intellectually disabled brother and $29,300 from her dying father.
Her appeal was heard in the High Court at Dunedin yesterday where defence counsel Sarah Saunderson-Warner argued Judge Crosbie should have converted the sentence to one of home detention.
The fraud came about because of McMahon’s gambling problem and her lawyer emphasised she had spent three months working with a counsellor to address that addiction.
Ms SaundersonWarner also highlighted two letters before the court from the appellant’s doctor.
They detailed her various complaints, which included a stroke, diabetes and depression.
When the case was compared with benefit fraud and employment fraud, Ms SaundersonWarner said, it was clear home detention could be considered appropriate to denounce and deter McMahon’s behaviour.
‘‘Imprisonment is a sentence of last resort,’’ she said.
Last week, the district court heard how the woman had easy access to both victims’ bank accounts.
As caregiver to the men — aged 84 and 69 — McMahon had authority to use their accounts to cover their daytoday costs and bills.
While she made sure the basics were covered, she also helped herself.
Judge Crosbie talked of the ‘‘cruel premeditation’’ by coercing her brother, who struggled to read and write, into allowing her access to a trust account, the judge said.
‘‘A particularly cruel aspect of this is to go as far as getting into a trust fund, which is locked up, and to get your brother’s consent to do that when he wouldn’t have known what he was doing is so much worse than accessing bank accounts when there’s cashflow coming in,’’ the judge said.
Her father, before he died in August 2015, told one of his sons he suspected she was stealing from him but the son convinced him she would never do that.
When he died, the truth came out. At yesterday’s appeal, Crown prosecutor Robin Bates underscored the ongoing effect the fraud had had on McMahon’s family.
‘‘The appellant deflected inquiries made at one stage about the money and therefore in effect added to the stress of the family members when the offending was eventually uncovered,’’ Mr Bates said.
‘‘That additional deception was of great concern to family members who trusted the appellant.’’
Justice David Gendall accepted Judge Crosbie’s sentence might have been at the upper end of what was required but did not exceed it.
McMahon’s offending against her brother began less than a year after she was sentenced to community work for bankcard fraud committed against her motherinlaw.
Justice Gendall said that sentence had not deterred the woman from further offending.
The decision to sentence McMahon to imprisonment was a discretionary one for Judge Crosbie, who made no error in law, he said.
Justice Gendall dismissed the appeal.
rob.kidd@odt.co.nz