Rare sentence: Hawke's Bay sex offender who targets teen boys may never be released

Justice Jan-Marie Doogue in the High Court at Napier sentenced a serial sex offender to preventive detention . Photo / File

A serial Hawke's Bay sex offender who targets young teenaged boys has been sentenced to preventive detention with a minimum term of five years' jail in a rare High Court decision in Napier.

But for the Crown's application for preventive detention, Robert John Brown, 59, would have been sentenced to four years' jail with a minimum term of two years.

According to one of the required specialist reports before Justice Jan-Marie Doogue, Brown represents a "high risk" of reoffending, and the sentence means he can only be released if at least two specialists and a Judge agree there is no further risk.

Appearing in the court today, Brown had been found guilty at a judge-alone trial earlier this year on four charges of unlawful sexual connection with a young person, taking his number of convictions for similar offending since 1995 to 17, involving seven victims, all-but one aged 13-15 years.

Brown was still subject to an extended supervision order prohibiting unauthorised contact with anyone aged 16 years or under when he performed sex acts with a 13-year-old boy in mid-2018.

Two of the charges represented multiple offending, and there were 10 acts, with Brown paying the boy $200 a time, apart from the last when he gifted a cellphone.

In his trial he had defended the charges on the basis of his belief that he was in a relationship with the consenting male and entitled to believe he was aged over 16.

In court today, as the victim sat in the public gallery, Brown accepted he had "made a mistake", and that he should have taken steps to ascertain the victim's correct age, but Crown prosecutor Clayton Walker and the Judge both said the attitude highlighted Brown's penchant for blaming his young victims and his lack of insight into the harm he was causing.

Brown had previously been sentenced to nine months' supervision in 1995 for indecently assaulting a 14-year-old boy, to nine years' jail with a minimum non-parole term of six years in 2006 on nine charges relating to offences with three boys aged 13-15 years, and a further six months for offences on two more boys in 2005-2006, and on his only recorded adult victim, a fellow inmate in prison.

Justice Doogue noted that judges in 2006 and 2008, had decided against sentences of preventive detention, firstly by a "fine margin" and secondly only because Brown hadn't at the time started treatment programmes in prison.

The latest offending showed Brown had not responded to the eventual treatment, and she did not accept defence counsel Richard Stone's submission opposing the application for preventive detention which was made by Crown prosecutor Clayton Walker.

It included not accepting the submission that Brown's advancing age, turning "60 next year," made him any lesser a risk of reoffending.

Stone said there was no "grooming" of the boy, who he said had used the Grindr app to seek partners and had "portrayed" himself as an 18-year-old EIT student.

Victims in previous offending had mainly been boys Brown got to work with him while he was involved in rural contracting.

Walker said the payments in the latest events were a form of grooming, in a situation with a 44-year age gap and an offender still targeting pre-pubescent boys, claiming it was still a proper relationship, with a reluctance to accept a court's finding.

One report had noted a "psychopathic" trait in the offender, but he was not deemed to be suffering mental or physical illness such that it would be a factor in the sentence.

Justice Doogue said the physical nature of the latest offences showed an "escalation" of the activity rather than a situation of less risk.

In 2008, two prison officers and two security officers wrestled a struggling and kicking Brown to the floor of the same courtroom after he reacted angrily to guilty verdicts at the end of a trial in which he had conducted his own defence and, not for the first time, claimed accusers were lying.