Justice Muir said Paul “pushed all the wrong buttons” and Hohua essentially “rose to the bait”.
Paul’s partner said in her statement that she woke on the morning of his death to the sound of voices and noticed Paul wasn’t in the bed beside her.
She said she would never forget that morning and it was still “raw”.
“That was the most heartbreaking news I’ve ever had to wake up to in my life ... You have caused me trauma and you have changed my life in so many ways.”
The statement told Hohua there were other ways he could have tried to get Paul away from his home and he was the older man who should have made the right choice.
“You deserve to serve your time for what you have done but Lani doesn’t deserve to be lying in the ground where you put him.”
Justice Muir said he sentenced Hohua on the grounds the jury didn’t think he was acting in self-defence or that self-defence was reasonable.
The judge said he considered Paul swinging the fence paling was an attempt to “bat” Hohua away, rather than a threat.
He said the use of the knife was a disproportionate response to the level of threat that was faced.
“You were the aggressor. He was backing away from you as you approached.”
But Hohua appealed his sentence and the Court of Appeal reviewed Justice Muir’s sentencing, finding that his starting point of seven years and six months before discounts was “slightly too high” given how much Paul provoked Hohua before being stabbed.
They reduced that starting point by three months.
The court also looked at Hohua’s background which was characterised by severe physical and sexual abuse as the youngest of 17 children.
His mother’s partner hung him upside down on a washing line, locked him in a wardrobe, and knocked him unconscious, while his step-siblings physically and sexually abused him.
An assessor and psychologist for ACC said that if Hohua could not run he was quick to anger and displayed classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in terms of living in survival mode, making him easy to trigger.
“Mr Hohua endured a violent, chaotic and abusive childhood that might well justify a discount in itself. But more than that, he emerged from that childhood psychologically damaged in a very distinct way,” the Court said in its decision.
“The consequences of PTSD in the present case was that Mr Hohua’s need to ensure his personal safety was seriously threatened by Mr Paul’s refusal to leave and his aggressive goading of Mr Hohua to fight.
“Dissected clinically, it is possible to see that the opportunity existed for Mr Hohua to step back and disengage.
“But viewed through the lens of Mr Hohua’s mental state it is clear that this would have been a very difficult thing for him to do. His instinctive response was to fight and that instinct reflected the disordering effect of PTSD.”
The Court found that in these circumstances Hohua should have been awarded a 25 per cent discount, which combined with a 5 per cent discount for remorse would have reduced his sentence to a total of five years.
They also reduced his minimum non-parole period meaning in theory he might only have to serve two years for the manslaughter of Paul.
