Johnnie Puna murder sentence was correct, Court of Appeal finds

Johnnie Puna was 19 when he murdered 45-year-old father of two Mark Geoffrey Beale. Photo / File

The Court of Appeal has upheld a sentence of life imprisonment with a minimum of 14 years non-parole for a Hawke's Bay teenager's drunken killing of a man at Haumoana.

The appeal was on behalf of Johnnie Puna, who was 19 when he murdered 45-year-old father of two Mark Geoffrey Beale on the beach at the Tukituki River mouth on the night of February 5, 2017.

The body was found next the next morning. Puna pled not guilty to a charge of murder, though conceded he had been involved in the assaults.

He was found guilty at the end of a High Court trial in Napier last year and sentenced in February this year.

An appeal was heard on September 3 and a judgment delivered on Tuesday.

The bench of three judges did not accept the arguments made by defence counsel as highlighting anything that would have impacted adversely on the verdict.

Among the grounds argued by lawyers Eric Forster and Alex McPherson was that a judge's direction to the jury on the level of intoxication — fuelled by home-brew vodka supplied by the victim — "wasn't adequately made".

Puna was intoxicated at the time and the jury needed to consider whether it could be proven beyond reasonable doubt that he appreciated Beale would die from the beating, Forster had said.

"The reference to Mr Forster's description of Mr Puna as being 'out of his mind because he was so drunk' is telling insofar as criticism is directed to the Judge's summary of the defence case," the Appeal bench says.

"Consequently we do not consider that there was any deficiency in the Judge's description of the defence case."

There were three planks to the appeal, all dismissed.