Court urged to jail paua poacher

Te Kaha

The Crown today asked the Court of Appeal to jail Maori activist Te Kaha for his role in a black-market paua ring.

Te Kaha was sentenced in January by Judge Charles Blackie in the Manukau District Court to 320 hours community work, while his nephew Trent John Karaitiana was given 350 hours.

Today in the Court of Appeal in Auckland, Crown prosecutor Madeleine Laracy asked for the community work to be replaced with about a year's imprisonment.

The pair admitted charges of conspiring to defraud the New Zealand public after about 100kg of paua was sold to an undercover fisheries officer in 2003.

"The offending involved plundering of a natural resource which must be carefully managed in order to be sustainable...It is important that sentences imposed for such offending take full account of the need for general deterrence, the great difficulty the Ministry has in detecting such offending and the value and vulnerability of the resource at stake," Ms Laracy told the judges.

She said that the district court judge erred in principle in determining that sentences of community work should be imposed to maintain parity with other co-offenders.

Ms Laracy noted that there were differences in the charges, the extent of their involvement, the stage at which the guilty pleas were entered and the personal circumstances of the offenders.

Te Kaha's lawyer, Charl Hirschfeld said that the sentence of community work was "reasonable, just and fair".

Karaitiana's lawyer, Jim Boyack, said the district court judge was correct to conclude that it would be an injustice to sentence his client to prison when co-accused remained in the community.

Te Kaha achieved notoriety in 1997 for stealing a Colin McCahon painting from the Aniwaniwa conservation centre at Lake Waikaremoana.