KEY POINTS:
One man is dead and several others are nursing wounds because once again a murderer was let loose. It is easy to say this sort of death and suffering could be avoided. Of course it could, if killers like Graeme Burton were locked away for life. Hindsight says he should never have been granted parole but it is harder to say the Parole Board should have known better.
Burton was imprisoned for a murder committed in 1992 when he was still a very young man. By the time he was released in July last year, having been refused parole in 2002 and 2004, he had served 14 years and he had reached his mid-30s. Rehabilitation may be a rarity in prison, as the Sensible Sentencing Trust contends, but many young offenders who seem destined for a criminal career do straighten themselves out after the age of 30. Statistics show a marked decline in crime after that age.
Six years into his sentence, Burton escaped from Paremoremo with three other prisoners and all were recaptured after 11 days. When he became eligible for release after 10 years, the Parole Board deemed him a high risk of reoffending. He was held until he had served the full standard term of a life sentence in this country. Even then, a psychologist recommended that he be closely supervised.
The public needs questions to be answered now about the decision to release him and the quality of his supervision. In December, less than six months after his release, he had breached the terms of parole and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Police found a cache of weapons and ammunition at his home. On the run, he is said to have committed an assault in Wellington and a home invasion in Lower Hutt before his deadly desperado act on the Wainuiomata hill on Saturday evening.
Now surely we can count society safe from Graeme Burton for a very long time, hopefully the rest of his natural life. But that is too late for a young man, father of two, who was riding his quad bike in the bush when Burton apparently shot him. The decision to release Burton stands as another failure of the parole system, alongside the mistaken mercy shown William Bell, who killed three people in the Mt Wellington RSA in 2001, Shane Hoko who strangled a woman while on parole the same year and Taffy Hotene who stabbed a woman in the Glen Innes Reserve three weeks after his release in 2000.
The passage of five years since the previous parole killing suggests the system has been tightened somewhat but clearly it has much room for improvement. Burton is a worse error than the earlier cases in one sense. Bell had been paroled on a sentence for robbery, Hoko for kidnapping, Hotene for rape. Only Burton had previously been convicted of murder.
Parole boards have an invidious task; they must assess people not on the basis of behaviour in the controlled environment of a prison but on their likely response to release. The hardest cases will be those inmates who are most "institutionalised". The most docile in custody may be most feral when set free if they have lost the skills and the will to live independently. They reoffend to receive a ticket back to a warm cell and regular meals. The worse they reoffend, the longer their ticket.
All such prisoners need sound, reliable supporters and supervision to ensure they can live outside prison walls. Graeme Burton, according to the Parole Board's decision to release him, "has a number of people in the community who are prepared to support him" and it had asked that he be given a series of pre-release home leaves. "It is regrettable, (through no fault of his own)," says the board, "that this request has failed to achieve any result." Why, then, was he released?
If sympathy for him outweighed the risk to society, parole has again let us down.
