“Given his condition and disability, his survival in India is impossible,” Sona Kaur wrote in a petition signed by just under 2500 people before it was submitted to Parliament. “The Government has issued him a death sentence.”
Singh has been on immigration officials’ radar since July 2014, when he was served with a deportation liability notice. He had applied for residency in 2001 under the Children and Adult Child policy, which required that he have no immediate family in India. However, he had a brother living illegally in Germany, which meant the brother should have been listed as a permanent resident of India, immigration officials decided.
Although he met the criteria for deportation, the letter noted that then-Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse had reviewed the circumstances and decided to suspend the liability for deportation for five years. However, there were conditions attached to the probation period, including that he couldn’t be convicted of any crime.
Just months later, in December 2014, Singh was eating a takeaway pizza in his car when he perceived that another person parked on the shared driveway was making fun of him and he decided to ram the other person’s vehicle - pushing it back about two metres.
The victim would later tell authorities he thought Singh was trying to kill him and his daughter and the incident made him fearful for himself and his family.
Singh was charged with assault with a weapon, but the charge was eventually downgraded to wilful damage and he was sentenced to 12 months’ supervision in 2017 after pleading guilty.
It wasn’t until four years later, in 2021, that Singh received a letter informing him that his deportation liability had been reactivated due to his conviction.
Singh’s new lawyer, Tudor Clee, acknowledged that his appeal of the conviction was years past deadline but he argued that it would be in the interest of justice for High Court to entertain it anyway. Justice Davison agreed.
Clee said that Singh had no recollection of the immigration document he received in 2014, even though Singh acknowledged it has his signature. He never informed his previous lawyer about the immigration situation. If he had, Clee said, the lawyer could have sought a discharge without conviction to try to avoid the additional immigration fallout.
In his decision, Justice Davison pointed to psychiatric reports that suggested the defendant had suffered symptoms of schizophrenia, including a belief that people were poisoning his food, for years before the driveway incident. He was eating takeout in his car on the day of the crash because he was fearful of eating a home-cooked meal, court documents state.
Singh was admitted to hospital twice in 2015 under the Mental Health Act. The first time was after threatening to douse himself in petrol and light himself on fire as a result of “persecutory beliefs about what others were doing to him”. The second time came after he cut his wrist in front of his parents, took several sleeping pills and called police to say he was being murdered.
Prosecutor Jessie Fenton noted that the psychological reports did not mention any memory loss at the time. She said he had a detailed memory of the incident that led to his conviction.
But Justice Davison disagreed his memory of the driveway incident meant he would have also remembered the document.
“...It is clear that the appellant was experiencing serious mental health issues during this period, and his poor mental health may well have significantly affected his capacity to understand and recall the contents of his deportation liability notice,” the judge wrote.
“In my view it is likely that the events from which his offending arose, in which he perceived the victim to be mocking him about his disability, mimicking him by walking on all fours, and calling out Islamic slurs, would have made a more enduring impression on the appellant’s memory than being served with a technical legal document, outlining the suspended rather than actual consequences of failing to provide certain information to immigration authorities when he applied for New Zealand residency some 13 years earlier.”
The fact Singh did not mention the immigration issue to his initial lawyer, the judge said, is “cogent evidence in support of the proposition that he had either forgotten the notice or he had never properly understood its legal and immigration implications”.
Had the lawyer asked the judge for a discharge without conviction in 2017, it was likely Singh would have received it, Davison decided, noting that the defendant pleaded guilty and was noted at the time as having expressed regret for the incident. He also took steps to improve the management of his mental health medication, which seems to have worked because he has not offended since then, the judge also noted.
While the driveway incident was no doubt frightening for the victim, no one was ultimately hurt, the judge also said, suggesting that Singh’s culpability was lowered because he “appears to have distorted his perception of the situation” due to his serious mental health issues at the time.
The Crown noted Singh had 10 previous convictions, two for behaving threateningly. The consequence of deportation is not out of all proportion to the gravity of his offending, Fenton argued.
But Davison wasn’t persuaded.
“I find by a considerable margin that the consequences of conviction are out of all proportion to the gravity of the appellant’s offending,” he said.
