Auckland Women’s Prison inmate Mihi Bassett, mistreated by Corrections, loses bid to revive appeal

An Auckland Women’s Prison inmate who received a rare apology from Corrections for what a judge would later describe as “degrading” and “inhumane” treatment has lost her bid to resurrect an appeal of the “manifestly excessive” sentence that put her behind bars in the first place.

Mihi Isibella Bassett has been in prison since 2016, when the then-23-year-old was sentenced in Manukau District Court to 10 years’ imprisonment for a violent home invasion two years earlier.

Believing they were targeting a “paedophile”, Bassett and her co-defendants organised a “hit” that involved a shotgun, a knife and hammers, according to an eight-page decision issued by the Court of Appeal this week.

“Ms Bassett and her co-defendants detained the family at gunpoint and then assaulted everyone present (one member of the family managed to escape and ran to get help),” Justice Mathew Downs noted in the decision, which he authored on behalf of the three-judge panel.

“The assaults were vicious and gratuitous. The intended target sustained the most serious injuries, which required hospitalisation and surgery. But the most enduring harm to the victims appears to have been psychological. They describe the offending as life-changing.”

Bassett was charged with aggravated burglary, kidnapping, injuring with intent to cause grievous bodily harm and a raft of other alleged crimes. She pleaded guilty on the same day as a sentencing indication hearing in which Judge John McDonald advised her he would adopt a starting point of 12 years, with a 15 per cent discount for her guilty plea.

Her lawyer at the time had advised her to take her time before deciding whether to accept the sentence indication, the Court of Appeal noted.

“She did not do so,” the judgment states.

Bassett found herself back in Manukau District Court after she and other inmates were charged with arson in 2019. But a hearing last year saw the tables turned on Corrections as Judge David McNaughton criticised the conditions that led to the short-lived and ultimately harmless revolt.

“You have suffered enough,” the judge told Bassett at the conclusion of the hearing as he declined to stack additional jail time onto her existing sentence, according to coverage of the hearing by RNZ.

The judge described a concerted effort to break Bassett’s spirit, including holding her in a segregated unit known as “the pound” for four months despite regulations stating that stays should be for no more than 15 days. She attempted suicide after three months in the segregated cell but was resuscitated and sent back the next day, RNZ reported. The judge also noted that she had been made to lie on the ground while being fed and she had been pepper sprayed in her cell multiple times.

Minister of Corrections Kelvin Davis issued an apology at the conclusion of the hearing.

But the jail conditions were not mentioned in this week’s Court of Appeal judgment, or in November when Bassett appeared before the judges via an audio-video feed from prison.

Instead, the focus was placed on whether she should be allowed to appeal against the home invasion sentence even though the standard deadline has long since expired.

Testifying to the Court of Appeal, Bassett said she wasn’t able to give her former lawyer proper instructions. She knew that she was likely to get a long sentence, but she was told a trial would result in a longer sentence, she said.

“I had no idea what I was in for,” she said. “I didn’t know much back then. I would never have agreed to be in the predicament I’m in. I was quite naive to a lot of the process. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.”

Prosecutors pointed out that she had previous convictions in 2010, 2011 and 2013 so she would have had some familiarity with the justice system, but Bassett said circumstances were different in 2016 because it was the most serious charge she’d ever faced.

Court records show she instructed her lawyer at the time, Aaron Dooney, to file an appeal of the sentence as “manifestly excessive”. He did so in November 2016 but filed a notice to abandon the appeal five months later after a phone call from Bassett in which he noted she was “unequivocal” in her instruction to drop the matter.

Bassett said last month she had no memory of giving such an instruction.

In 2021, she attempted to re-file an appeal of the sentence.

The Court of Appeal noted in its decision this week that out-of-date appeals are sometimes allowed to be revived, but such permission “is not given lightly”. Such situations include when it is found that the defendant did not make a deliberate and informed decision to end the appeal or in “exceptional circumstances” when it is in the interest of justice.

The justices noted they have no reason to doubt the account from Bassett’s former lawyer that he was told to drop the appeal. There was also no evidence she was incapacitated to give such an instruction, they found.

“My impression of Ms Bassett was not of someone operating in a fog or haze, unable to make her own decisions,” the lawyer said in an affidavit to the Court of Appeal.

The “principle of finality” also figured into the Court of Appeal’s decision.

“The five victims would all have concluded, quite reasonably, the court case was behind them. So too their local community,” the decision read. “The offending occurred in 2014. Ms Bassett pleaded guilty in 2016. She was sentenced the same year. She abandoned the appeal in 2017. Even the most recent of these events is now five years ago.

“Ms Bassett’s explanation for the delay is unconvincing, a conclusion buttressed by our advantage in observing Ms Bassett testify. The interests of justice do not, therefore, support the abandonment [of the appeal] being set aside.”