Editorial: To be tried as an adult for an offence at 14 seems unjust

The discussion of sexual crime in recent years has highlighted the fact that the damage these crimes do can last a long time. Photo / 123RF

EDITORIAL

For all its faults, especially on the subject of deportations, Australia is one country that could be expected to have the confidence of New Zealand law courts. Yet the case we report today suggests that confidence has serious limits.

A young man now in his 20s is wanted in Australia for an alleged sexual assault committed when he was aged 14, against the 10-year-old daughter of his father's partner. Judges in the New Zealand Court of Appeal have declined an extradition request from Australian police because the law governing juvenile crime is evidently different there from here and the judges fear that if found guilty he would be sentenced as an adult.

The case has some complicating features. Initially the police acceded to the family's wish that he not be prosecuted. The family, including his father, decided he would be sent to a youth refuge for treatment and counselling. But near the end of that year, he came back to New Zealand on a visit with his father and his father's partner and, while here, his mother, who had legal custody of him, decided he should stay.

He has been here since apart from two visits to Australia in 2016. He finished high school here and now has a promising athletic career. He has no convictions. He made those visits to Australia unaware, it seems, that fully five years earlier New South Wales police had issued a warrant for his arrest, the girl's family having changed their mind about pressing charges the year after the incident.

New South Wales police did not seem to know he was there, which seems extraordinary because over the previous three years they had made several applications to New Zealand for his extradition. Their officer on the case had even visited this country and spoken to him after the first application. Yet the first the young man knew of the charges and the extradition requests was in May 2016, almost six years after the alleged offence.

New Zealanders will be less interested in the finer points of extradition law than the question of whether justice will be served. No criticism should be made of the alleged victim's family for changing their mind about seeking a prosecution. The discussion of sexual crime in recent years has highlighted the fact that the damage these crimes do can last a long time and it has become not unusual for victims to act on the realisation that not enough was done about the crime at the time.

Nor should the Australian police be criticised for pursuing the case so far. Police in all countries like ours have been criticised for not taking sexual complaints seriously enough in the past. It falls to the courts to decide whether justice is served by sending a person to face trial as an adult for something he may have done at 13 or 14.

The difficulty of that decision is evident in the fact a District Court and the High Court in this country ordered the young man be surrendered to Australia before the order was quashed on appeal in December. Now it could go to our Supreme Court and ultimately the Minister of Justice might be presented with the dilemma.

If Australian justice cannot treat this as a juvenile crime, the case ought not to go there.