During sentencing at the Tauranga District Court, Judge Geoghegan said that he considered her young children were also victims of the offending, as they had witnessed the violence.
“There are children all over New Zealand ... who are traumatised by domestic violence meted out generally to their mothers by their fathers or their mother’s partner, and this is no exception,” he said.
Amituanai’s series of violent outbursts began when he grabbed his partner by the hair and dragged her, while her children looked on, into a bedroom where he hopped on top of her and punched her repeatedly, all over her body.
He put her in a headlock and covered her nose and mouth, to the point she felt suffocated and couldn’t breathe. When she tried to get free, he tightened his grip around her neck, a court summary of facts said.
He then took her keys so she couldn’t leave.
The woman said in a victim impact statement she had feared for her life and thought she was going to die. She was also worried for her children, fearing they might be harmed too.
She suffered bruising to both of her arms and had a sore neck and head following the attack.
The next morning the woman’s ex-partner, the father of her two children, arrived to collect the children and asked her to come outside too, because he feared for her safety.
Amituanai told the woman that if she left, he would stab her ex-partner in the face, in front of the children.
The woman went with Amituanai in his truck and they stopped at a petrol station, where the woman’s ex-partner pulled up next to them.
He got out and walked in front of the truck to get to the woman’s side of the car to speak with her. Amituanai turned on the truck and attempted to run him over.
Things came to a head again as the two cars were driving nearby, following the petrol station incident, and Amituanai stopped suddenly in front of the ex-partner’s car, got out with a machete, and went running towards him.
A victim impact statement provided by the ex-partner said he was upset knowing his children had witnessed both an assault on their mother, and their father being chased with a machete as they sat in the car.
Police later stopped Amituanai and issued him with a safety order, prohibiting him from contacting the woman for five days. However, he later sent her Snapchat messages apologising to her.
He also drove past her address several times, before being arrested for breaching the safety order.
Amituanai’s explanation for the events, outlined in a pre-sentence report given to the judge, was that the ex-partner hadn’t accepted his relationship with the woman, and this had made him lash out.
“An explanation like that Mr Amituanai is really separating you from taking responsibility. Nothing made you do anything, you were unable to regulate your emotions.”
The judge said strangulation was the leading charge, imposing uplifts to a starting point of 30 months’ imprisonment for other offending and previous violence convictions.
He had two previous convictions for assaulting a person in a family relationship and one for strangulation.
Amituanai was given a 20% discount for his guilty plea, and then sentenced to two years and three months’ imprisonment.
Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.
