Teen murderers get life sentences reduced by court

Three young people convicted of murder have successfully appealed their life imprisonment terms and had their sentences reduced.

Christopher James Brown and Georgia Rose Dickey were aged 19 and 16 respectively when Jack McAllister, 19, was stabbed to death in Invercargill in 2017.

The appeals were heard last July.

The other, unrelated, case before the court was Katrina Roma Epiha, who was just shy of 19 when she fatally stabbed Alicia Nathan, 32, at a Christchurch house party in 2017.

In each case the terms of life imprisonment were quashed and replaced with fixed sentences – 15 years for Dickey, 12 years for Brown and 13 years for Epiha. Their minimum periods of imprisonment before each could go for parole were also reduced to reflect their reduced overall sentences.

Dickey’s minimum non-parole period was reduced from 10 to 7.5 years, Brown’s from 10 years to six, and Epiha’s from 10 years to seven.

The cases were used as tests for sentencing adolescents, raising issues including what responsibility young people should bear when their brains were not fully developed, and the effect on them of the prospect of unending jail.

The Sentencing Act states young people convicted of murder will be sentenced to life imprisonment unless manifest injustice is established.

While each of the cases were found to have this injustice present, creating a category exception for youth murderers could only be done by Parliament, the Court of Appeal decision said.

Therefore, while these cases sentences were reduced on appeal, the decision should not be used as a precedent for other cases.

The seriousness and culpability of the offending remained centrally important, it said.

‘‘It also remains generally true to say that youth alone is not enough to establish manifest injustice.

‘‘However, young persons may present with a combination of mitigating circumstances relevant to the offending and personal mitigating factors which together are capable of establishing manifest injustice.’’

The younger the offender at the time the sentence was imposed, the more heavily it may weigh on them, the court found.

‘‘The experience of imprisonment will also be harsher where they present with other characteristics, such as intellectual deficits or mental health, social or behavioural problems associated with abusive or disrupted upbringing.’’

Having decided that a sentence of life imprisonment would be manifestly unjust, the court must then fix the type and duration of the determinate sentence that will be imposed instead.

The appeals were allowed in each case and the sentences reduced.