Lukin Hamlin stole various goods worth $1282 from the Bunnings Westgate store in Auckland in a single day. Photo / Dean Purcell.
A “relentless” shoplifter with more than 100 convictions does not believe he should be in prison.
Lukin Hamlin was sentenced to 14 months in jail when he appeared in the Waitākere District Court in February – a sentence he thinks is wrong and has now challenged in the High Court.
The 46-year-old’s sentencing was linked to a raft of dishonesty charges stretching back to January 2022, including thefts from supermarkets, petrol stations, a stationery shop, a general store and a hardware retailer.
Court documents say that in a single visit to a Silverdale retailer in that month, he took a coffee machine, a vacuum cleaner and a knife block with a combined value of $1350.
In a visit to the Bunnings store at Westgate five months later, he stole various goods worth a total of $1282.
These offences followed a pattern of accumulating shoplifting convictions dating back to 2009, punctuated by short sentences of prison or home detention.
By August 2021, when he received a five-month home detention sentence, Hamlin had 105 convictions on his criminal record, mostly for theft or shoplifting.
The offences for which Hamlin was sentenced in February were on top of these 105 convictions, and involved more than $5000 worth of stealing overall, yet Hamlin did not feel he deserved another jail term.
He appealed his prison sentence to the High Court, saying he should have been given intensive supervision instead.
Intensive supervision is a community-based sentence where offenders have to report to a probation officer regularly and attend any rehabilitation courses they are referred to.
Hamlin had previously been heard before the Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Court (AODTC), from where he had been sentenced to a Salvation Army Bridge Programme – an intensive course to help people get over their addictions. He attended the programme for a while, but then absconded from it and carried on stealing.
When he was sentenced in February, Judge Lisa Tremewan said Hamlin had been “clearly told” that being referred to the AODTC was an alternative to prison.
“It is one of the main rules in there,” the judge said.
“People are only eligible for the court if they are otherwise going to prison, and you will have heard me say earlier that people do not better their position by then absconding from the court and reoffending.”
Judge Tremewan imposed a jail term of one year and two months.
In his appeal to the High Court, Hamlin’s lawyer, Grant MacDonald, argued that the judge had given no consideration to the rehabilitative aspect of sentencing in imposing the prison term.
He also said that Hamlin’s progress in the time he was engaged with the Bridge Programme confirmed that his rehabilitative prospects might justify a community-based sentence.
Five months on electronically-monitored bail should have met the “punitive function” of sentencing sufficiently, and a lengthy period of intensive supervision was all that was necessary.
However, High Court Justice David Johnstone disagreed.
“In my view, Judge Tremewan displayed considerable leniency when arriving at a sentencing end point of 14 months’ imprisonment, despite the relentless nature of Mr Hamlin’s offending over the period from January 2022 to May 2023, which came following numerous bouts of similar offending and the regrettably unsuccessful rehabilitative sentencing approaches of prior courts.”
Justice Johnstone dismissed the appeal.
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of front-line experience as a probation officer.
Police could be seen cordoning off a street in the area.