KEY POINTS:
A 20-year-old burglar owing more than $70,000 in fines is likely to escape paying the money because he lacks the means.
Kennedy O'Connor Williams was sentenced to one year and 11 months in prison at the Tauranga District Court yesterday after admitting five burglary charges.
The judge ordered
him to reappear on July 30 for sentence in relation to the fines. He said as Williams had no prospect of paying them he was likely to receive a further prison term.
The unemployed 20-year-old ranks among the country's top 20 fine dodgers. Crown lawyers and the Ministry of Justice said the nearly $72,000 he owed was extremely high, particularly for someone his age.
Williams' lawyer has told his client he is likely to face another six to eight months behind bars.
Williams committed the burglaries to feed a P habit, and also pleaded guilty to charges of car theft, and possession of instruments for burglary and smoking methamphetamine.
Judge Christopher Harding said his victims were unlikely to receive financial redress for the crimes.
"Reparation is not a realistic prospect," he told Williams. "You have no funds."
The court heard that children living in the burgled homes had been psychologically scarred by the break-ins.
"[They include] a 9-year-old boy who has needed doctor's visits, so afraid is he that the burglar might come back," the judge said.
Another was a young girl who was terrified for days.
Williams' lawyer David Bates and Crown prosecutor Elaine Tan asked the judge to deal with the issue of Williams' fines at yesterday's hearing, but the judge said that was inappropriate until he was a sentenced prisoner.
Ms Tan said the amount Williams owed was "monumental", and the Ministry of Justice's collections unit told the Herald that he was the country's 17th worst fine defaulter.
The unit's central region collections manager, Ray Dyet, said the 20-year-old had racked up $71,845 in unpaid fines since December 2002, mostly through traffic violations.
"That's a lot of fines for anybody to accumulate," Mr Dyet said.
But Williams owed nothing for reparation, which is a significant proportion of many top fine dodgers' tallies.
Mr Dyet said "extreme efforts" had been made to make Williams comply because defaulters were put before the courts to resolve unpaid fines only as a last resort.
Other measures, such as seizing or selling assets and tapping into bank accounts, were adopted first.
"Our job is to do whatever we can with the enforcement sanctions that we've got available to us," Mr Dyet said.
"If we believe everything we have done is not successful, our role is to report that to the judiciary and for the judiciary to make a decision."
If a judge imposed a prison sentence, the fines were scrapped and the ministry's involvement ended.
The ministry was unable to provide figures on the number of people whose fines had been remitted by prison sentences, but the percentage was said to be small.
A record $207 million in fines was collected in the 2005-06 financial year, and the figure was forecast to rise to $216 million this financial year.
The proportion of overdue fines fell from 79 per cent of the total in 2002-03 to 54 per cent in 2005-06.
The top 10 defaulters are either overseas, in prison (and unable to pay), or being closely monitored by the ministry and subject to repayment plans.