Scribe’s sentence breach connected to shootings
Christchurch’s mosque shootings prompted rapper and hip-hop artist Scribe – who is a Muslim – to leave the city and breach his supervision sentence.
The 39-year-old performer, real name Malo Ioane Luafutu, admitted that breach when he was back in the city yesterday to be sentenced for possessing methamphetamine.
Christchurch District Court Judge Raoul Neave handed down a further intensive supervision sentence that will put Luafutu into rehabilitation for eight weeks.
Luafutu was going to make an application at the hearing to be discharged without conviction, but defence counsel Elizabeth Bulger told the court that application was being abandoned.
She said Luafutu had not reported as part of his supervision sentence since March 12, which amounted to four missed appointments.
The breach was directly connected to the events of March 15, when 50 people were killed and 39 others wounded in shootings at two Christchurch mosques.
‘‘Being of the Muslim faith, he decided he would leave Christchurch because of what had happened. He accepts that it was a decision that was entirely in his own hands and he was abrogating his responsibilities with what he did. But those events upset him so badly he felt he had no choice.’’
Bulger urged Judge Neave to cancel the present supervision sentence and impose a new sentence of supervision which would allow Luafutu to take up a place at a He Waka Tapu residential rehabilitation programme which was to begin on April 30.
Judge Neave agreed and imposed a six-month sentence of intensive supervision with a special condition that Luafutu undertake assessment, counselling, treatment, and programmes as his probation officer directed.