Judge rejects Corrections’ extended supervision request for repeat offender Sekoa Anae

Sekoa Anae returned to the High Court at Auckland for an ESO hearing four years after he was sentenced for violent and sexual offences. Photo / NZME

A request by Corrections to continue monitoring a recently released prisoner whose criminal history includes more than 70 convictions in Australia and New Zealand has been denied.

When Sekoa Anae, 51, was last sentenced to prison in 2019 - for charges ranging from sexual abuse of a minor, robbing a man at knifepoint and a series of lewd phone calls - prosecutors had sought a rare sentence of preventative detention, which would have allowed him to be kept behind bars or monitored indefinitely.

Justice Gerard van Bohemen told him at the time that he was deciding against preventative detention, but only by “a narrow margin”. Anae was instead sentenced to five-and-a-half years’ imprisonment, and he was released last June.

Since then, Corrections has requested an extended supervision order, or ESO, another rare legal manoeuvre which would have subjected Anae to parole-like conditions even though he has served the entirety of his sentence. Extended supervision orders are intended to protect the public from those considered to pose an ongoing risk of further sexual or violent offending.

But in a reserved decision issued this week, Justice Edwin Wylie said Anae didn’t fit the narrow criteria required for such a “draconian measure”.

“The ESO regime imposes limits on the right of an offender not to be punished again for an offence,” the judge noted. “This right is affirmed in ... the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. It is a right of fundamental importance and any denigration from it requires strong justification.”

Anae’s criminal history dates back to 1987 and continued after he moved to Australia around 1990. He was deported to New Zealand in 2003 after serving a prison term for armed robbery, assault and other offences.

The same year he returned to New Zealand, he broke into a home while intoxicated and a teenager awoke to find him licking her while holding a knife to her throat. He was sentenced to six years’ prison. He was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment following a 2011 incident in which he rubbed his groin against a woman, blocking her exit as he did so. And in 2015, he held a 30-centimetre-long butcher knife to a person’s throat during an argument over money, resulting in a 22-month sentence.

During a hearing earlier this month in the High Court at Auckland, prosecutor Henry Benson-Pope argued to Justice Wylie that Anae had a “pervasive pattern of serious sexual offending” and there was a high risk he would commit sexual offences in the future.

“He emphasised the number of discrete incidences, the number of victims and the seriousness of the offending in 2003 and again in July 2015,” Wylie summarised in the decision released this week. “He also noted that Mr Anae’s convictions for sexual offending span some 12 years.”

In a statement submitted to the court, Anae said he recently started psychological counselling to see if he could be treated. He said he was in poor health but hoped to return to work this year.

“He denied that he poses a risk to the public and said that he just wants to get on with his life,” the judge noted.

Justice Wylie agreed with the Crown that Anae showed a pervasive pattern of serious sexual offending, including seven instances where he offended sexually against six different women.

“In my judgment, Mr Anae’s history of sexual offending permeates his background and is sufficiently characteristic to serve as a predictor of his future conduct,” he wrote.

But for an ESO to be imposed, Anae would also have to presently show an intense urge to sexually re-offend and he would need to have a predilection or proclivity for serious sexual offending. Those criteria were not met, the judge said, basing his decision in part on testimony and reports by two psychologists.

The contents of the health assessor reports and testimony were suppressed by the judge to protect Anae’s privacy.

“Mr Anae appears to be more of an opportunist offender,” Justice Wylie wrote. “His sexual offending has been disparate. He has not persisted with more serious offending when challenged. There is little if anything to suggest that he has a predilection or proclivity for serious sexual offending.”

Had those criteria been met, “the need for public safety would have outweighed Mr Anae’s right to be free from a second penalty and justified limits on his freedom of movement and association”, the judge noted.

“However, the statutory criteria have not all been met... The criteria are mandatory and conjunctive. They are a precondition to the making of an ESO and if the Court is not satisfied of one or more of them, it cannot impose an ESO.”