A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
THREE Gisborne teenagers who thought they were posing in sexually-explicit ways for a woman on line were actually photographed by a man they knew, Gisborne District Court heard yesterday.
Ian Colin Ball, 21, appeared for sentence having pleaded guilty to 22 charges of possessing objectionable images — pictures of each of the three young men and a video of one of them.
Judge John Bergseng sentenced Ball to three months' home detention with six months' post-detention conditions, for “preying on the vulnerable” and doing enormous damage to the teenage boys.
The judge warned him any re-offence would result in a different outcome. Such matters were serious, so much so that the maximum penalties increased in May this year from five years imprisonment to 10, the judge told him.
When police seized Ball’s computer and other electronic devices in February, it was found to hold pictures and movies of a sexual nature.
The offences with which he was charged related specifically to the three Gisborne teens. Judge Bergseng said Ball used his knowledge of social media and his technical expertise to create three false female persona, then used them to approach the three teenagers on-line using applications such as Skype and Omegle.
He presented his female characters in various sexual poses and stages of undress to encourage the teenagers to behave similarly, then captured images of them which he retained on his devices.
He would communicate only via text chat, disabling the sound and visual display from his computer so that he could see and hear his targets but his true identity remained unknown to them.
The offending came to light when the mother of one of the young men found images that shocked her on her son’s computer and reported the matter to police.
The IP addresses of the false persona were traced back to Ball, a student in Tauranga at the time. Police prosecutor Claire Stewart said sentencing for such matters in New Zealand followed UK guidelines but that made a difficult task of assessing a suitable starting point.
New Zealand courts took into account aggravating features of the offending in assessing start points but the UK did not.
The aggravating features of Ball’s offending alone still took it into category C (the lower level) of the UK guidelines. Sentencing options ranged from a “high-level community order” to 26 weeks in custody.
Threshold for custodial sentenceThe issue for this court was whether Ball’s offending reached the threshold for a custodial sentence, Ms Stewart said.
Police believed it did but Ball’s counsel Phil Dreifuss disagreed. Judge Bergseng said he believed imprisonment was appropriate and set the starting point at eight months.
He was willing to convert the sentence to home detention but only because the majority of the offences were in the lesser category and importantly because there had been no sharing or wider distribution of the images.
(Ball’s three Facebook persona had 20 to 25 “friends” but it was accepted he had not shared the images to them.)
While the offending occurred over more than a year, Ball’s actual capture of images of the three men was limited to relatively few distinct days, the judge said.
Ball captured 11 images of one of the teenagers over three days in the middle of last year, then a further image of the same young male about a month later. He captured four images of another young male on a single day in February last year and a video of him masturbating on another day. Six photos of the third teenager were captured on another day.
Counsel Phil Dreifuss disputed some of the aggravating features identified by police. Judge Bergseng accepted his submission that the age of the young males was at the upper end for the offence and therefore an element of it rather than an aggravating feature.
Mr Dreifuss said he would have agreed it was an aggravating feature had the victims been very young — toddlers for instance.
Mr Dreifuss said there was no significant breach of trust because the young men thought they were disclosing to a stranger. But Judge Bergseng disagreed, saying that was only due to Ball’s deception and it was worse when it turned out to be someone they knew.
Mr Dreifuss said mitigating factors included Ball’s lack of previous convictions, early guilty pleas, stated remorse and prior good character.
Ball was willing to attend counselling and health funding had been approved for him. However, it was decided those sessions should begin after sentencing, when Ball was no longer in fear of what might happen to him, Mr Dreifuss said.
Judge Bergseng applied discounts of 25 percent for Ball’s guilty pleas and 20 percent for his personal mitigating factors, but withheld any reduction for remorse. Ball’s remorse was more because he had been caught rather than the type necessary to warrant a discount, the judge said.
The judge told Ball he hoped that over time and with maturity he might realise the enormous damage he had done to the three young men. It would remain with them for a large part of, if not their entire lives.
They would no doubt require assistance as time progressed, the judge said.
“You preyed on the vulnerable and you must never do it again. If you repeat it, the outcome for you will be different,” Judge Bergseng said.