Editorial - August 21, 2012

A beastly business

It's hardly surprising that the people of Wanganui have not welcomed the news that Stewart Murray Wilson is to be released into their midst. The now 65-year-old Beast of Blenheim is a decidedly unsavoury character whose crimes were despicable, but the reaction of some to plans for his release on September 1 is bordering on hysteria, aided and abetted, perhaps created, by media that have been unable to resist milking the story for all it is worth.

No one, Corrections included, can guarantee that people who are paroled into the community have reformed and/or will behave in anything approaching a law-abiding manner. We are told, however, that the release conditions imposed upon this man are unprecedented in New Zealand, and as far as possible leave little if any scope for further offending.

Those provisions include that he will live in a state house that it is to be transported to a site outside the Wanganui prison gates, some 10 kilometres from the city itself; that he will wear a GPS tracking device that will raise an instant alarm should he travel outside strict boundaries; and that he will be under 24-hour surveillance. There is a whole raft of conditions, 17 in all, governing his movements and behaviour, and what he will and will not be allowed to do. It would seem that every reasonable precaution has been taken to prevent him from re-offending, although he is to be released because the law says he must be, rather than because he is no longer considered a risk.

Indeed he has not been released before this because of what the parole board has described as his unrepentant behaviour, his unwillingness to engage with treatment options and his assessed risk of reoffending, which is described as high to acute. The fact that he has formed a long-term relationship from behind bars hasn't helped his cause, given that the parole board has described his "nominated support person" as having a history of mental disability, and is currently serving a community-based sentence (for what we don't know).

The community/media response has become a little hysterical, however. It would be a fair bet that there isn't a town or city in the country that would want this man living on its doorstep, but violent criminals are released into New Zealand communities every day. Some of them have not been reformed by their prison experience or treatment, and go on to reoffend. Even if they don't offend again, at least on the scale that put them in jail in the first place, they can be dangerous, and intimidating. Or they would be intimidating if we knew who they were. We don't know them because they haven't come to media attention, so we don't worry about them.

Wilson might be a bad man, but he is far from unique. In fact most of the charges that put him in jail in 1995 can probably be found on any Kaitaia District Court list in any given month, albeit not under one individual's name.

His problems with society date back to 1962, when, as a 16-year-old, he became a convicted burglar. As a teenager he spent long periods in psychiatric institutions, and before the 1980s were over he had convictions for assaulting females, assaulting a child and living off the earnings of a prostitute.

In 1995 he was convicted of sexual offences against 16 female victims over a period of more than 20 years. Specifically he was convicted on seven counts of rape, one of attempted rape, six of indecent assault, two of stupefying, one of attempted stupefying, two of wilfully ill-treating a child, three of assaulting a female and one of bestiality.

Many of the charges were laid representatively (covering more than a single offence), and one of the rape victims was a young teenager, who was reportedly attacked in front of her mother.

In 1996 he was sentenced to 21 years' imprisonment (which begs the question as to why he must be released 16 years later), the sentencing judge noting that preventive detention was not available given the timing of the offences.

The question, then, is not whether Wilson will be an asset to the people of Wanganui, but whether sufficient measures have been put in place to protect them from their new neighbour, or more pertinently perhaps whether sufficient steps have been taken to protect him from those neighbours.

Some in Wanganui have made it clear that they do not believe he will be safe there, while on a less hysterical level others want to ban him from entering their business premises.

From the safety of the Far North - and one wonders what the reaction might have been had Wilson been destined for a new home outside the prison fence at Ngawha - it would seem that every possible base has been covered, although only time will tell. Those who have whipped themselves into a lather over his pending release might comfort themselves with the knowledge that at least one other man whose deeds made him a monster in the eyes of many has apparently slipped back into society with barely a ripple, however.

Mark Stephens, aka the Parnell Panther, was paroled into the care of a family member at Ahipara in May 1992, with great media excitement. The reception committee at Te Ohaki Marae included one Paul Holmes, who made the trip north via helicopter, and did not react well when he was denied an interview.

Stephens was recalled to prison seven months later, was released again in February 1993, was given a three-month prison term (presumably for breaching parole conditions) in April 1994 and a six-month suspended sentence (again presumably for breaching parole) in October 1994. That was the last anyone has heard of him.

He was last known to be living on Auckland's North Shore, a stone's throw from where his offences were committed.

His release in 1992 was met with a public outcry, and protests from the Police Association, much being made of the court's finding at the time of his sentencing in 1983 that he was too young to be held in preventive detention. Events since then suggest that preventive detention was not needed, at least from the point of view of protecting the public, which is, after all, its sole purpose.

Preventive detention, which enables an offender to be held in jail indefinitely, is not designed as a punitive measure, although many people no doubt believe that some offenders should never be released given the nature of their crimes.

Stephens' 1985 convictions were for the rape and robbery of a young woman two years earlier, although he had been convicted of assaults on women earlier in that decade. In all he had close to 100 other convictions.

Meanwhile, it's fair enough that Wanganui should have something to say about the release of a man of Wilson's calibre into its midst, but there are apparently no legal alternatives, under existing law, to releasing him somewhere, and no stone seems to have been left unturned in Corrections' efforts to prevent further offending. Any behaviour that sees him recalled to prison is much more likely to arise from his inability to comply with his parole conditions than further offending of the kind that put him in prison in the first place, and it helps no one to portray him as more of a monster than he is, or a danger that he is unlikely to be.