KEY POINTS:
The new Government, in announcing that it will legislate before Christmas for tougher bail laws, has plainly heeded public unease about the number of serious offences committed by people already on bail awaiting trial on other charges of violence.
Law changes will provide that bail may not be given if there is any risk to the public, rather than the more qualified "real or substantial risk" of existing law. But the Government might also profitably devote some attention to the judicial mess that goes by the name of home detention.
Since October 1 last year, home detention has been a sentence in its own right, rather than a way of serving a prison sentence. On the face of it this is a good idea: the state is saved the cost of keeping home detainees locked up, not to mention housing, feeding and clothing them. But recent events suggest that it is being inconsistently applied, with results that range from questionable to manifestly unjust.
As we have revealed today, American tourist and would-be immigrant Cheryl Blair, who crossed the centre line and collided with a motorcycle, killing Julie Ann Smith, was given six months' home detention by Judge Gregory Hikaka in the Pukekohe District Court. The charge, of dangerous driving causing death, carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison or a $20,000 fine. The judge said that he took Blair's "extraordinary personal circumstances" into account when deciding what sentence to impose but suppressed the details of those.
Julie's parents, Gaye and David Smith, were distraught at the leniency of the sentence. "Is that all Julie's life is worth?" Gaye asked.
The case is, sadly, not unique. In September Judge Anne Kiernan gave a sentence of 12 months' home detention to former policeman Jason Peters, who had collided, while driving drunk, with another car, robbing 38-year-old Auckland woman Michelle Davies of her memory, agility and energy. Incredibly, Peters, who had fled the accident scene, was given credit for writing a letter of apology to Davies' daughter Gemma two years after the event.
It is plain and not just from the law change establishing home detention as a standalone sanction that it is becoming a popular option for judges. Official figures show that between 2000 and last year, month-by-month tallies of people on home detention rose from barely 100 to around 450 having at one point climbed as high as 600.
Neither were all non-violent offenders. Figures released mid-year by then Corrections Minister Phil Goff showed that more than half the 1517 offenders who had been given home detention in that period had convictions for violence, sex and drug crimes.
Plainly some in the judiciary realise that the public is taking a dim view of judges who let serious offenders enjoy the comforts of home and the company of friends while ostensibly paying a debt to society. In Hawke's Bay this month, Judge Tony Adeane sent to jail a teenager involved in the home invasion that sparked a massive "Enough is Enough" anti-crime rally, saying he feared a public backlash if he did anything less.
By contrast, police are - quite rightly - appealing against a sentence of home detention given to drunk driver Lesley Caudwell because her fear of unfamiliar places would have made life in jail difficult.
Home detention, judiciously used, is not without merit. But it should not be granted to violent offenders or seen as appropriate punishment for the worst homicides involving the lunatic use of a motor vehicle. The level of anomaly is far too high to be acceptable and the Government needs to move swiftly to ensure that judges have clear guidelines about when they may impose a sentence of home detention and when they most certainly may not.
