Preventive detention for sexual predator
HE WAS a little old man, silverhaired and 75 years old. But for about 40 years he committed sexual offences against children as young as 4 or 5, probably scarring some of them forever, a judge says.
The man’s name is suppressed because some of those crimes have been against members of his own family. In the High Court at Wellington yesterday, the man was told he was a sexual predator who had avoided an open-ended term of preventive detention years ago only because of the threats he made to some of the children to secure their silence.
In 1998 he was sentenced to 91⁄ years’ jail for sexually violating a 5-year-old boy. The judge then declined to impose preventive detention and gave him credit for not being charged with any for 17 years.
But in fact he had been offending. The 11 charges on which he was sentenced yesterday dated from 1978 to 1991.
His age and infirmity now meant the Crown did not ask for preventive detention. Justice Ron Young added another four years’ jail on top of the three years the man was sentenced to in December last year.
The judge said the sentencing exercise was ‘‘not easy’’ because of the combination of historical offending being discovered at different times, some of it after the man had been sentenced for other crimes committed within the same time frame.
The man had seriously affected
offences the lives of many young children, often from his own family, the judge said.
The most recent offences that had come to light were against three girls. The offending had scarred the victims, now adult women, and it was likely to do so for the rest of their lives.
The man had denied the charges until the week before his trial was due to begin in the High Court at Rotorua in June.
He then pleaded guilty to three charges of rape, six of indecently assaulting girls under the age of 12, and two charges of having committed unlawful sexual connection.
His offending stretched back to 1956, when he was sent to borstal for having sex with girls under 16.