Alcoholic Benjamin Brown asked judge for instant sentence to avoid jail for bail breaches

Benjamin Brown asked a district court judge to sentence him rather than releasing him on bail.

An alcoholic who decided honesty was the best way of avoiding jail asked a judge to sentence him on the spot rather than re-releasing him on bail.

“That’s very candid of you,” a bemused Judge Peter Hobbs told Benjamin Brown in the Wellington District Court on Tuesday.

With five bail breaches already, any further indiscretions risked him being sent straight to jail, Brown told the court.

He admitted the raft of charges laid against him and asked to be sentenced.

Having spent the afternoon scheduling jury trials as far out as November next year, Judge Hobbs didn’t need convincing. But Brown wasn’t finished describing his criminal record as “a colourful one - in the wrong way,” adding he’d been in jail for a “long, long time.”

“I can see that,” Judge Hobbs said.

Brown was charged after he and an associate forced their way into a Wellington city bar in November, taking electronic tablets and bottles of alcohol before leaving through the broken door.

While on bail for those matters, he was arrested and appeared in court for approaching a man in an inner-city car park building with a knife, forcing the man to protect himself with a road sign.

Brown mistakenly thought it was Judge Hobbs who’d dealt with him after that arrest, adding he may have been intoxicated when he appeared.

“You’d have to be intoxicated to confuse me with Judge Crowley,” Judge Hobbs quipped.

“He’s a much better-looking judge than me, he’s got a full head of hair.”

Judge Hobbs noted that while Brown had been on bail, there had been a number of breaches, but he’d been very honest about the reasons for those.

“You’re an alcoholic, you accept that, you want to get these charges dealt with because of the risk of you being jailed for further breaches of bail,” Judge Hobbs said.

On charges of unlawfully being in a building, theft, possession of a knife and the breaches, Brown was sentenced to 50 hours of community work and ordered to pay reparation of $1000.

Catherine Hutton is an Open Justice reporter, based in Wellington. She has worked as a journalist for 20 years, including at the Waikato Times and RNZ. Most recently she was working as a media advisor at the Ministry of Justice.