The judge agreed that Penk’s crimes, targeting a vulnerable child, were disturbing.
“You did nothing wrong,” he told the young teen, calling her “incredibly brave” for coming forward.
“I just want you to know that.”
Penk faced up to 20 years’ imprisonment after he was found guilty at trial earlier this year of grooming for sexual conduct with a young person, three counts of indecent assault and four counts of sexual violation of a child.
Jurors were told he first used a driving lesson as a guise to get the girl alone. But after the lesson finished, he drove past her home and asked her if she could keep a secret.
“No, you’re not doing this. I’m 13,” the girl recalled saying, which caused him to desist and drive her home.
But after that, he would find other opportunities to isolate her. His advances became more persistent, to the point where he would ignore her crying and pleas for him to stop, the court was told.
Throughout that period, he also sent a series of inappropriate text messages, calling her his “secret angel” even as he acknowledged the messages were “dumb and risky”.
“Kissing you is magic,” he wrote.
Defence lawyer Luka Grbavac said his client - a long-time methamphetamine addict whose bumbling antics living in Australia have seen him the subject of past media coverage - didn’t believe he had committed the crimes until he heard the evidence at trial.
“He does accept it,” the lawyer said of the charges. “Obviously, he was in the throes of addiction. He remembers very little of much of this.”
The judge did not appear sympathetic to the defendant’s explanation.
“Many people who suffer from drug addictions do not sexually abuse other persons,” he said.
Penk’s prior drug charges included an incident in Queensland in 2015 in which police found 1g of meth hidden in his car along with a pipe, scales and $5000 cash, which he claimed to be holding for a woman whose surname he couldn’t remember, according to a report in local newspaper The Courier Mail.
He was visiting the front counter at the police station less than two months later when he accidentally dropped another .7 grams of meth on the floor.
Two years later, his lawyer described a “raging habit” that led to his arrest for manufacturing the drug with the help of The Great Big Narcotics Cookbook - a publication banned in New Zealand since 1995.
At the recent Auckland District Court hearing, Crown prosecutor Ruby van Boheemen noted that Penk’s risk of reoffending was assessed as medium and his risk of causing harm to others was assessed as high.
The judge, however, focused mostly on the harm he had already caused to his victim. Penk got to know the girl well enough to assess her vulnerabilities, and then set about exploiting them, he noted.
Judge Sharp also reminded Penk that he took the case to trial, risking worse trauma for the girl.
“You challenged the victim about things you knew to be true,” he said of the child’s cross-examination by the defence.
As a result, the judge said he would not allow a sentence reduction for remorse. He did, however, allow minor reductions for mental health and addiction issues.
The end result was a sentence of five years and three months’ imprisonment.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
