On one visit to Rebel Sport in Hastings on Anzac Day in 2022, she took 49 clothing items worth $2463. She returned to the store a month later and took a further $310 worth of clothing, and again in June 2022 to steal goods worth $800.
The final visit to Rebel Sports was on the same day Te Aho had used a stolen credit card, taken with a handbag from a parked car, to make purchases totaling $1429.
That offence mirrored another incident the same month, when she used a credit card taken from a wallet stolen from a car in a Hastings driveway to spend $2500.
But none of these were considered her most serious offence when Te Aho ended up in the Napier District Court after pleading guilty to 25 charges, plus a further shoplifting charge from 2021.
Judge Russell Collins said the lead offence was a burglary in September 2022, when she forced open the window of a Flaxmere house and stole high-value electronic items, jewelry and clothing from inside.
When the occupants returned unexpectedly, she jumped out of a window and came face-to-face with the owner’s daughter, a child. It was then, with the items in her arms, that she told the girl she was sorry and they were for her and her boyfriend.
Judge Collins jailed Te Aho for three years for the raft of offending, which also involved other shoplifting incidents and unlawfully entering or taking cars – once by lifting a staff member’s keys from behind the counter of a restaurant.
However, Te Aho has now managed to get four months taken off that prison sentence by appealing to the High Court over the calculations Judge Collins used in sentencing her.
When she was sentenced in February this year, Te Aho was no stranger to the courts, or even prison.
At the age of 27, she had a criminal record which ran for 17 pages, mostly for dishonesty offences - shoplifting and theft, burglary and using a document for pecuniary advantage.
She had committed more than 100 crimes while on bail for other offences, and when she offended last year, was on release conditions after being freed from prison in March 2022.
Judge Collins sentenced Te Aho to three years in prison on the Flaxmere burglary charge, with lesser concurrent sentences for the other offending.
Te Aho appealed the sentence to the High Court, and Justice Paul Radich – on reviewing Judge Collins’ calculations – said he would have imposed a sentence of two years and eight months. He reduced Te Aho’s prison term accordingly.
The High Court judgment listed information about Te Aho’s background which had been taken into account in for sentencing her.
Justice Radich said Te Aho came from an unstable family background involving hardship and drug use, with an “emotionally abusive” gang member for a father.
“She self-reports having ‘lived poverty’ and needing to offend to survive,” Justice Radich said.
“Her mother left her father because of his drug use. Her father introduced Ms Te Aho to methamphetamine at around the age of 13,” he said
“Her most traumatic period was, she said, with her ex-partner, who was ‘patched with the Mongrel Mob, violent, unfaithful, an extreme manipulator and the most horrible, mentally abusive person you could ever meet’.
“She said that this emotional abuse would make her turn to drugs and offend.”
In first sentencing Te Aho, Judge Collins made no order for reparations and remitted her outstanding fines of $15,273 because she would not have been able to pay them.
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.
