The woman agreed to the recordings in the belief that they would be kept private between them.
However, after the relationship ended, Carter demanded the woman pay him money for debts that he claimed she owed him, including for cannabis.
Carter repeatedly demanded the woman and her new partner give him money and sent a text message suggesting compromising photographs might be emailed to her employer.
The woman’s partner gave Carter $1000 in the hope that it would end the blackmail attempts. It did not.
Four times in January and February 2021, Carter sent explicit images of the woman to her, her partner, and some of her work colleagues.
The still images, taken from the videos, showed the woman naked and sometimes engaged in sexual activity with Carter.
“The images were accompanied with messages demanding that [the woman] pay her bills and warned that things would get worse if she did not,” the Court of Appeal decision said.
One message threatened to place life-sized images of the woman in public places and on building sites.
Messages were not sent from Carter’s usual phone but from a “burner phone” - a cheap device which can be used anonymously and then discarded.
The Court of Appeal said police searched Carter’s property in response to his blackmail attempts in March 2021 and found 33 cannabis plants and 30 millilitres of “fantasy”, the drug gamma-butyrolactone.
Carter was found guilty of blackmail in the District Court and admitted cultivation of cannabis and possession of a Class B drug before being sent to jail.
He appealed on the grounds that sentencing judge, Kirsten Lummis, set the starting point for his sentence too high and did not adequately consider giving him home detention instead of prison.
However, the appeal court said it saw no error in the starting point, considering the nature and seriousness of the offending, the “gross abuse” of trust involved, the intrusion into the woman’s privacy, and the threat to publish life-sized images in public.
The Court of Appeal justices also said a sentence of home detention was not appropriate, because Carter had breached electronically monitored bail six times in the 680 days he had been subject to its restrictions.
“In these circumstances, it would not have been appropriate to sentence Mr Carter to home detention where he would have been subject to essentially similar conditions,” the decision said.
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of front-line experience as a probation officer.
