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Newsletter No : 14, November 2005

SST VISION : A PATRIOTIC CRIME FREE NEW ZEALAND

Our future is in your hands

Dear Members,

The election result was a fantastic morale booster for the Trust. A number of MP's who did not support us were rejected by voters and replaced by those committed to endorsing the Trust's law and order policies.

Your support and generosity has helped bring about change in many different ways and we want the success of the Trust to continue....

The Sensible Sentencing Trust is now the largest organisation fighting for Victim's Rights and Justice Reform. To ensure the continuation of our success the next three years will be critical for the long term future and direction of the Sensible Sentencing Trust. The Board has made a commitment to do all in its power to ensure the Trust's survival. With that in mind we are now canvassing our supporters for a three year commitment.

We have been encourage by many members who donate by monthly automatic payment. We now give you the option to do the same by enclosing an automatic payment form.

While we realise many of you have recently donated we would appreciate an indication on the tear off form below if you are prepared to make a long term commitment. This would allow us to plan and budget for the trust's future.

Kind Regards

Garth

We can't change the past - but the future is in our hands!

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Mother's cry for justice

Article from front page of Hawkes Bay Today here

The sobbing mother of a girl murdered 18 years ago visited the scene of her daughter's death for the first time yesterday, while supporters demanded the immediate resignation of Attorney General Margaret Wilson.

Ida Hawkins, who has been grief-stricken since her 16-year-old daughter Colleen Burrows was brutally murdered by Mongrel Mob members on the banks of the Tutaekuri River in 1987, asked Ms Wilson's office for $702 to cover the cost of her travel from Wairoa to Wellington to tell a Parliamentary Select Committee of her anguish and opposition to the Prisoners Compensation Bill.

One of Colleen's killers, mobster Sam Te Hei, is one of the claimants included in the Bill, and is believed to be in line for $25,000 compensation for treatment he has received at Hawke's Bay Prison. He has already won a $90,000 settlement from the Crown for his treatment in an Auckland jail some years ago. Ms Wilson turned down Mrs Hawkins' request for reimbursement of her travel costs, which has left the Sensible Sentencing Trust fuming.

Spokesman Garth McVicar said the Government was hypocritical. It had paid out $2.1m to anti-smoking lobby groups to support anti-smoking legislation, but it wouldn't pay $702 to hear the story of a woman who was still suffering the effects of her daughter's murder 18 years ago.

Yesterday, Mrs Hawkins clutched a photograph of Colleen and wailed as she and supporters approached the riverside site where her daughter's body was found battered and mutilated beyond recognition 18 years ago. Mr McVicar read out a statement she had prepared.

"Margaret Wilson should resign. She had the cheek to pay the scum who murdered Colleen $90,000 but refused to help me travel to Wellington to stop him getting more compensation. As far as I am concerned she is no better than the criminals themselves."

As Mrs Hawkins placed flowers beside the photograph of her late daughter, Mr McVicar said the trust, which paid the $702 cost of Mrs Hawkins' trip to Wellington, would re-present the $702 invoice to the Government, "and we hope they pay it".

Napier MP Russell Fairbrother said today the invoice for Mrs Hawkins' costs should have been sent to him, as the local MP, not to Ms Wilson's office.

Mrs Hawkins gave very good information to the committee. "We benefited from her evidence," he said. But Mr McVicar said the chairman of the Select Committee, Tim Barnett, had told Mr McVicar to send him the invoice, "which I did".

No response was received, so Mr McVicar followed up. Mr Barnett's office told him the invoice should instead go to Margaret Wilson's office.

Again, there was no response, so Mr McVicar followed up with a letter directly to Ms Wilson, which resulted in her refusal to pay.

Mr Fairbrother said it was now too late for him to take the invoice to the Select Committee for a decision on whether to pay it, but if he was still in Government after next week's election, he would do so.

He was unable to attend yesterday's gathering at the river because he was out of town, he said.

ACT justice spokesman Stephen Franks stood up to speak about his party's justice policy as someone in the audience called out "where's bloody Fairbrother, our local MP?"

He told the 20-30 people gathered beside the river yesterday that "helpless, frustrated victims are being shut out of the justice system", and their views on punishment ignored.

His party proposed to return victims to the heart of the criminal justice system, putting their interests ahead of the "so-called needs of criminals, rejecting the theory that if we are nice enough to criminals they will become nice back".

ACT would reinstate punishment as a purpose of sentencing, end automatic concurrent sentencing, end parole for all offenders so that the sentence given was the sentence served, hand out maximum sentences after three repeat offences, protect restorative justice, and give victims a right to be heard in sentencing hearings.

Instead of discounting sentences where offenders showed remorse, sentences would be increased when offenders failed to show remorse. ACT would rebuild custodial psychiatric facilities, introduce a verdict of "guilty but insane", end prisoner rights to windfall compensation and lower the age of criminal responsibility.

Mr Franks said Labour was putting out election pledge cards with Parliament's crest on them, despite the fact they were blatantly Labour Party propaganda, and which had probably cost hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to produce.

"That's appalling when the Sensible Sentencing Trust was denied $1000."

NZ First candidate Ron Marks said he had all the right ingredients to be a criminal - he was Maori, brown-skinned and from a broken family - but he wasn't.

There was no place in a civilised society for people like Te Hei, he said.

"Labour is soft in the heart and head, and soft on crime. Anyone who votes for Labour or Mr Fairbrother is voting for more of this garbage," he said.

National's Napier candidate Chris Tremain said his party planned to abolish parole for repeat and violent criminals, and abolish compensation for criminals in the justice system.

Kicked to death on banks of river

Colleen Burrows was kicked to death on June 19, 1987, on the banks of the Tutaekuri river by Mongrel Mob members wearing steel capped boots. They then drove over her badly beaten body with their car.

They did this to her because she'd refused to have sex with them after they picked her up off a street in Napier. Her body was found the next day, so mutilated that her mother was not allowed to see her.

One of her killers, Sam Te Hei, was sentenced to life in prison, and is eligible for parole later this year, which Mrs Hawkins and the Sensible Sentencing Trust vehemently oppose

Insult to Injury

It's cause for deep shame. Tough words by the Government about blocking compensation to crims and stumping up for the victims have been revealed as little more than a sham.

In 1987 a thug raped 16-year-old Colleen Burrows on a Napier riverbank. With his mates he drove over her repeatedly and kicked her to death.

He's in jail now but he's $90,000 richer thanks to compensation. But there's no compensation for the girl's mother, Ida Hawkins, one of the two victims who travelled to Wellington. She went to appeal to a parliamentary committee, asking it not to reward crims.For her pains, the Attorney-General's Office refused her reimbursement of $702.

Next to the killer's windfall, Mrs Hawkin's costs were contemptibly small. And set besides the prodigality of government spending on hopeless causes, the paltry concession might have been a sign that all those grand gestures about protesting the interests of victims were sincere.

How petty and mean-spirited to turn her down flat. Today, Napier MP Russell Fairbrother said he would look into the case.

However it is a grotesque inversion of natural justice when Government indifference merely adds to the harm already suffered by victims and their families.

It happened in 1989, but no-one's been held responsible

Burning baby's screams ignored

Hawkes Bay Today story 24th October 2005

Convicted murderer and rapist Paul Bailey turned up the volume of his television to drown out his two-month-old daughter's screams of agony as she lay burning to death in a cane laundry basket on a stove, the Sensible Sentencing Trust says.

The baby's mother, Rose Shortland, also ignored the screaming and refused to let anyone else in the house check what was wrong with the shrieking baby until the fire in the kitchen exploded a window.

The Napier-based Trust has uncovered new information about the baby's terrible death, and is asking police to reopen the case. It has statements of evidence from four people who say they witnessed a series of shocking events that ended with the baby's death in Bailey's house in the small South Island town of Ettrick 16 years ago.

The information will be presented to the Dunedin Coroner on Monday with a formal request for an inquest to be held. The Trust will also send the witnesses statements to the police, and it will ask police headquarters to investigate why the circumstances of the baby's death on April 8, 1989 were never properly established.

The Sensible Sentencing Trust was contacted about two months ago by Chris Dean, of Christchurch, after he read that Bailey had recently admitted to two charges of raping a 12-year-old girl - one of the other people present in Bailey's house the night baby Linda died - in the months after the baby's death.

The rape victim, now an adult, had fought the legal system for 14 years to have a prosecution brought against Bailey, finally succeeding after the intervention of the Solicitor-General.

Two months ago Bailey was sentenced to three years imprisonment for the rapes, to be served concurrently with his murder sentence for killing a 15-year-old schoolgirl.

The Trust is appealing, and asking for eight years on each rape charge, to be served consecutively. Bailey is due to apply again for parole next year, and it is not beyond possibility that he could be deemed to have already served his sentence for the rapes, trust founder Garth McVicar said yesterday.

Mr Dean told Mr McVicar he had decided he could no longer live with his dreadful memories, and it was time to tell people what he knew about the events he saw unfold on the night Linda Bailey died.

The police had not been interested in hearing what he or another 18-year-old male, Ronald Stratford, had seen at the house. They interviewed only the girl who was later raped, and another teenager, Tania Dryden, then 14. Mr Dean was her boyfriend at the time. The statements from all four tell of a horrifying series of events.

They say they were invited to watch the television show Ready To Roll at Bailey and Shortland's house on the night of the fire, and were told to arrive at 6pm.

When they got there, they found the couple had set up the lounge furniture in a room formerly used as a bedroom. Bailey had the remote control for the television.

Ms Shortland, who the witnesses say "obviously despised" Linda, and frequently referred to her as a "f..... little slut" or "f..... little bitch", usually let Ms Dryden and the other girl cuddle and nurse Linda to sleep, or pick her up on the rare occasion that she cried.

But that night they were allowed only a cursory hold of Linda before Ms Shortland whisked her away, then rejoined the group in the lounge, and shut the door.

The woman whose name is suppressed said it was only minutes later that Linda began to cry and quickly reached "fever pitch", screaming, audible despite the blaring television.

Mr Dean's statement of events says that as Linda began to cry, Bailey raised the sound on the television to drown her out. The younger girl pleaded to be allowed to pick the baby up, but Ms Shortland said "leave the spoilt little bitch alone".

"The baby then started really, really crying, in fact I would say screaming. Paul turned up the volume on the TV even more," Mr Dean said. "Between the songs you could hear the baby screaming. (The younger girl) was saying "let me pick her up Rose, I wanna pick her up". Rose was saying "just leave the little bitch alone. She's just a spoilt little bitch".

Bailey then turned up the volume until it was so loud that Mr Dean felt he could not have spoken to Mr Stratford, sitting next to him, without shouting in his ear.

Shortly after, there was an explosion in the kitchen. Mr Dean leapt to his feet and raced to the kitchen, where he found the room black with smoke and the window blown out above the stove.

The fire had engulfed the top third of the basket completely in flames, down to Linda's chest. The basket was on the edge of the stainless steel bench, and a large quantity of bedding was hanging over the end of it and down on to the red-hot element, acting as a wick, Mr Dean said.

He alleges Bailey pushed past him, grabbed Linda and pulled the basket off the bench. He said Bailey's demeanour "seemed to be cold and calculating".

He alleges Bailey then took Linda to the bathroom where the bath was already filled with cold water. He plunged her into the water and "held her under the water for periods".

Ms Dryden says that while all that was happening, Ms Shortland grabbed the telephone, and fumbled with it, protesting that it was not working. Finally the younger girl ran to a shop next door and asked the owners to dial 111. by this time it was about 7pm.

Linda died that night in hospital.

Mr Dean said that on one occasion Ms Shortland showed him and Ms dryden a chart with pictures of sexual positions. She demonstrated one of them - Bailey's favourite - on the bedroom floor, and asked the girl on at least two occasions whether she would have sex with Bailey. She refused.

Only months after Linda died, Bailey raped the 12-year-old after he and Ms Shortland fed her whiskey and drugs.

The four say the events of that night still haunt them. Mr Dean cannot understand why he was not asked to give a statement until 1991. Mr Stratford said he was not interviewed until about four or five years ago. The younger woman says she was so traumatised she does not know whether she ever gave a statement to police. Ms Dryden said she cannot recall what she told police, but it was very little.

Two years after his baby's death, while on bail on a rape charge, Bailey kidnapped, raped and shot 15-year-old schoolgirl Kylie Smith in Owaka. He was sentenced to life in prison, which at the time effectively meant 10 years.

Kylie's parents, Bevan and Dawn Smith, sought help from Sensible Sentencing when Bailey's first application for parole came up in 2001. When his next hearing came up in 2002, the younger woman who witnessed baby Linda's death approached the Smiths and told them about what Bailey had done to her.

They in turn told Mr McVicar, who assumed that "the wheels of justice appeared to be working" and a case would eventually come to court. However it was not until Mr Dean contacted Mr McVicar two months ago that the wider story came out - a story that illustrates the danger of ever letting someone like Bailey out of jail, Mr McVicar says.

"You can't rehabilitate a guy like Bailey. He's a career criminal. He should be put away for life and never get out."