Pic case inmate’s plea for release

A blackmailer who got his 15-yearold victim to send him intimate pictures and then threatened to send them to her brother wants to be let out of jail.

Jacob Kirby-Parker, 26, was jailed for two years in August after pleading guilty to blackmail and exposing a young person to indecent material.

It is the second time Kirby-Parker, of Hawera, had been sentenced to jail for exactly the same offending. He got 19 months jail in 2016 and was granted leave to apply for home detention.

While on home detention he began communicating with his latest victim.

Kirby-Parker sent her a picture of himself in the shower and asked her for pictures. She sent some but with her head cropped out.

After she began to refuse contact with him he got angry and sent her threatening messages.

The abuse was uncovered by a school counsellor on December 7. Kirby-Parker had told her that if she didn’t start replying then he would show the photographs she sent him to her brother.

HIs lawyer Kelly Marriner asked the sentencing judge to consider home detention, but it was refused.

In the High Court at Wellington yesterday Marriner asked Justice Helen Cull to look at it again.

Justice Cull said she was concerned the sentencing judge may have double-counted some of the factors in the sentencing that led him to the starting point he took.

Marriner said Kirby-Parker needed specialised help that he could get on home detention

She said it was a category of offending that was not easy to turn off like a tap and the help he needed was to have been part of the previous sentence, but the condition was poorly worded and it was not done.

The judge said a new report recommended home detention in a home where he could not get access to the internet.

The judge reserved her decision.