Kevin Healy outside court at an earlier hearing. Photo / NZME
Former Marist brother Kevin Healy has been sentenced to a third term of home detention, this time for three months, for the indecent assault of boys in his care.
Judge Chris Sygrove told Healy, 82, on Friday that he should have spent a "long time in jail" as a younger man for his serial sexual offending against children during the 1970s and 1980s.
However, he said that justice should be tempered with mercy, and Healy was now too old and frail for a custodial sentence.
The offences dealt with in the Napier District Court on Friday happened in Wellington between 1977 and 1983, when the three boys involved were aged between 9 and 13 and Healy was principal of the Marist Miramar School.
He was also the head coach for the Marist Boys' rugby and cricket teams.
Healy, formerly known as Brother Gordon, continues to say that he has no recollection of what he did to the children.
But a victim who appeared in the Napier District Court via video link rejected this and said that Healy's "methodical denial, ducking and diving" had done nothing for him or the other boys who had been abused.
The man said Healy had shown no remorse or acknowledgment of the severity of his offending.
Another man was in the court who, according to the Crown summary of facts, had been abused on a school camp when Healy pushed him onto a bed and lay on top of him. Both were naked.
This man said outside the court that he was "definitely disappointed" by the lightness of the sentence for the three convictions dealt with, all for sexual assault on a boy aged 12 to 16.
But the victim said the home detention sentence had come as no surprise, and he was prepared for it when Judge Sygrove accepted that a prison sentence was inappropriate because of Healy's age and infirmity.
"If I had come forward 10 or 15 years ago, as the judge said, he may have been put in jail," the victim said.
Healy's victims' names are suppressed.
The man who read his victim impact statement via video link spoke of the shame he kept to himself for decades after Healy repeatedly put his hands inside his clothing and once got the boy to touch him on a school camp. No one except his wife knew what had happened to him.
"Even 40 years later I find it very hard to place my trust in people. I see altruistic behaviour in others as a ruse," he said.
"I cannot abide the touch of strangers ... I fear for my children."
He said he did not make a complaint until news stories appeared about Healy's earlier convictions for indecencies with boys aged 12 and 13, and one girl under 12, when he was teaching in the Wairarapa in 1976 and 1977.
The man said that a former school friend had spoken to him about the reports and told him "It was lucky it wasn't us, eh?" Within an hour of hearing this, the man had walked to a police station to make a statement.
The man said that if Healy wanted to show some contrition, he could reveal what steps the Marist Brothers took when complaints were made about him in the 1970s.
Healy was first sentenced to 10 months of home detention in November 2016, for four charges of indecent assault. He was sentenced to a further nine months of home detention for the indecent assault of another four victims in June 2020.
When spoken to by police about the latest charges, he said the complaints against him were lies, the court has heard. A pre-sentence report noted Healy's sense of entitlement and the breach of trust involved.
The Marist Brothers are an international Catholic order who have been operating schools in New Zealand since the 19th century. A statement on their website apologises for historic abuse and says the order is "co-operating fully" with the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care.