A prolific tagger has been sent to jail for 14 months and ordered to pay $15,000 reparation for a swathe of graffiti in Hawke's Bay.
Blair Kitchen, 22, of Hastings, was sentenced in Napier District Court yesterday on four charges of criminal damage, representing 476 offences over 18 months, estimated to have cost $82,800 to clean up.
Judge Bridget Mackintosh said it would have been impractical to hold a disputed-facts hearing relating to 62 other incidents in which his tags were also used, which would have pushed the bill over $100,000.
Judge Mackintosh said the outcome would have been much the same, and rejected defence counsel Eric Forster's pleas for home detention instead of imprisonment, because neither of two addresses put forward for the purpose was suitable.
At one address there were significant items linked to graffiti, she said, and living at the other was a person awaiting court appearances on other serious charges.
The spate of tags started appearing late in 2009, but while Mr Forster said it appeared to have stopped about the end of last year, it was not over until police searched an address in Hastings on April 18.
Kitchen admitted he had been tagging for four or five years, and said that rather than intending to cause any damage he had done it "for the art".
It had become like an "addiction," he said.
The four charges represented four groups of victims - network services specialists Chorus which had facilities and fixtures tagged more than 200 times, the Hastings District Council with more than 100 attacks on its property, the victims of 115 tags on commercial premises, and 25 residential victims.
Judge Mackintosh said Kitchen "forged" on in the face of warnings from the courts of a toughening stance, and of the ire of a community which believed graffiti was an expensive and distressing nuisance.
The district council, she said, was not on the same "wave-length" as Kitchen in his view that it was "art," and a commercial victim had counted the hidden costs in emotional stresses and effects on staff morale.
A probation report on Kitchen showed he initially thought it was good to see his tagging "out there" in public, but since his arrest he had shown insight and was "now more annoyed" with himself.
Mr Forster said yesterday Kitchen had been in work about five months, the end of his graffiti appearing to have come about the time he obtained employment. He said an order of reparation for $15,000 could realistically be paid off by Kitchen.
As well as admitting the damage charges, Kitchen admitted possessing 19g of cannabis which was found in the search of his home.