While the Department of Corrections might "take issue", the court should impose home detention as the least restrictive outcome for Brown, Mr Sceats said.
Jailing Brown again would achieve nothing. She would likely lose her accommodation and the cycle would start all over again.
She had recently breached bail by going across the road to use someone else’s washing machine after hers was stolen.
Taken into custody, she was released last week and arrived home to find her house had been ransacked. Her bedding and other belongings were out in the yard and had been burned, Mr Sceats said.
Judge Cathcart said his decision to grant Brown home detention was a “close call”.
She pleaded guilty to a raft of charges: burglary, intentional damage, dangerous driving, unlawfully taking a vehicle, assault, using profane language on a telephone, threatening language, and four breaches of bail.
They related to several incidents this year, the first of which happened at about 1.20am on April 28.
Brown got into DJ Mac Panel and Paint’s yard on Awapuni Road and was peering into a vehicle when she got distracted by a passing police patrol with flashing lights. She momentarily stopped what she was doing to shake her fists at it.
Turning her attention back to the vehicle in the yard, she got into it and promptly reversed into the business building. Then she aimed at the locked gates on the yard, and drove through them, ripping one from its hinges in the process.
It ended up on the footpath.
She drove towards Gladstone Road but hit a large concrete block in the middle of Grey Street at the railway crossing, significantly damaging the passenger side of the vehicle, including a tyre.
She continued at speed towards the Grey Street-Gladstone Road roundabout where she cut a corner, blowing the damaged tyre and causing the vehicle to fishtail. She drove straight through roundabouts at Bright Street and Peel Street before abandoning the car near the Emerald Hotel and heading up Wainui Road.
Brown’s later explanation to police “captured her bizarre state of mind that night”, Judge Cathcart said. She claimed to have stolen the vehicle to get police attention.
She was in custody at the police station on May 7 when she was allowed to make a phone call to her lawyer, who eventually hung up on her. Brown sat on the ground, continuing to yell at the phone box and refused to go back to the holding cells.
She shouted obscenities at an officer, lashing out and scratching him as he gripped her underarms in order to pull her back to her cell.
Later she called police wanting to make a complaint about the way police dealt with her.
Becoming increasingly agitated with the call taker, Brown spoke aggressively, repeatedly talked about setting fire to her house and ultimately threatened to blow up the police station.
Judge Cathcart noted the charge relating to that latter threat was substantially downgraded to a telecommunications offence since it was first laid as a more serious allegation under the Crimes Act.
On October 31, police got a call from a woman reporting Brown was throwing rocks at her, refusing to leave her property and screaming threats to kill her.
The judge set a starting point of 17 months imprisonment for the burglary, unlawful taking and dangerous driving charges. He uplifted it by three months for the other offences.
There was a further month’s uplift for offending on bail, five months discount for guilty pleas and four months discount for health and personal background matters.
Despite her poor compliance, Brown got two months discount for the 102 days she had spent on electronic monitoring bail, and a further four months discount in recognition of 57 days she had spent in custody on the charges.
