Obsessed man jailed for harassment

File photo / NZ Herald

A Dunedin man who harassed and threatened a woman for several years after becoming obsessed with her was jailed yesterday for 21 months.

Peter James Stuart, 32, had admitted threatening to kill the woman last month after being convicted of a similar offence earlier in the year.

Stuart was before the Dunedin District Court in July for making threats against the woman and was sentenced to community detention and intensive supervision with judicial monitoring He was ordered not to have any contact with the woman, but continued talking about her and harassing her.

On October 2, he undertook more harassment and made threats against her. He made nine "non-speaking" calls to the woman during the afternoon, then, over about five hours the same night, sent 25 abusive and threatening text messages, saying he was going to ruin the woman's life and describing her in obscene and offensive terms. He said he would maybe kill her one day, and she should look out for a knife in her letterbox so she lived her life in fear.

"I wish I could kill you right now," Stuart said in one text, saying it would "make the world a better place".

The victim of the defendant's obsession, a 52-year-old woman, read her victim impact statement in court yesterday, telling Judge Kevin Phillips how she lived in fear of Stuart and what he might do.

She did not know him or like him and she wanted no contact with him. His constant harassment had made her afraid she would become "a statistic", she said. She was physically and mentally exhausted by the ongoing harassment and threats over the past six years and her family and her friends were all very upset by what was happening.

"Why do I have to live like this," the woman asked, saying she felt the defendant was "robbing her" of her spontaneous approach to life.

Counsel Sarah Saunderson-Warner said one of the difficulties with the sentence of intensive supervision was that Stuart had not received the assistance he should have because he was not found suitable for a departmental programme.

The defendant suffered from major disabilities and was on medication, but did not meet the mental health or disability criteria for treatment programmes, Judge Phillips said. Prison would have been a short-term solution in July, but he thought community detention and intensive supervision would better get interventions in place to overcome the gap in the law which allowed specialists to "wash their hands of you", he told Stuart.

The help given did not protect the victim and, while there were "always worse cases of their kind, this is getting up there", the judge said.

He needed to look carefully at the effect on the victim but he also felt sorry for Stuart who had obviously "fallen between the cracks" of professionals not wanting to make a decision about the his cognitive impairment.

"Your obsession and fixation with this victim have got to end or you will spend longer and longer in prison," the judge told the defendant, sentencing him to 33 months' jail for the October 2 offending, with a concurrent six months on re-sentence for the earlier offence.

The sentence of intensive supervision was cancelled.

When released, Stuart is to be under special conditions for six months, with counselling and treatment as directed. He is to have no contact of any kind with the victim.