A woman who killed an oncoming motorist while chasing her lover’s wife in a car does not think she should be in jail for the fatal crash.
Sharanjit Kaur became so enraged at seeing her partner in a recent photo with his family that she waited outside a school for his wife and then followed her in a car.
In the course of her bad driving, she drove in the lane of oncoming traffic, killing 49-year-old motorist Jonathan “Jono” Baker instantly.
Kaur was jailed for four years after being sentenced in the Hamilton District Court earlier this year.
Now, she is appealing her sentence, with her lawyer, Matthew Goodwin, arguing the judge should have taken into account her poor mental health and issues related to her cultural background to reach a home detention sentence instead of jail.
He noted the 40-year-old had also completed 150 hours of community service ahead of sentencing, which should have prompted a discount for prospects of rehabilitation, and was indicative of remorse.
Kaur and her partner, known only in court proceedings as “Mr R”, had been together for eight years and were living together.
However, he was still married to his wife, and maintained a relationship with her and his children.
Kaur had a “meltdown” over seeing a photo of him with his family, and an argument with Mr R followed.
She then drove to his children’s school and waited for his wife before following her while she drove.
Kaur tried to intimidate the other woman, at one point stopping in the middle of the road and hitting her car windows before following her again at speed.
She eventually crashed into Baker’s car.
Kaur had been travelling on the wrong side of the road, at between 125km/h and 136km/h, immediately before the crash on Boyd Rd in East Auckland.
She had braked to reduce her speed to around 109km/h at the point of impact.
At sentencing, Baker’s wife, Andrea, described the last time she saw her husband on the morning of the crash; how he had made her a coffee and said “I love you”, before giving her a cheeky smile and leaving for the day.
At the appeal hearing in the High Court at Hamilton on Monday, Goodwin acknowledged it was a “tragic case”, where the outcome for the victim and his whānau had been “brutal”.
However, Goodwin believed the gravity of the outcome had been overemphasised in determining the appropriate sentence for Kaur.
There had been a failure by Judge Arthur Tompkins, in Goodwin’s submission, to look behind the offending.
Goodwin referred at length to a psychological report which referred to Kaur’s mental state, and her cultural background, which together presented, in his submission, a “causal link” to what happened on June 27 last year.
Goodwin said the expert had clearly set out the “psychological collapse” and impairment of decision making, but the judge hadn’t clearly explained, in sentencing, why he hadn’t taken it into account.
High Court judge Justice James MacGillivray asked Tompkins how what was set out in the psychological report – issues of isolation, depression, and suicidal ideation – was linked to the “sustained rage” that had been at play in the offending.
Goodwin said the expert appeared to be saying there had been an accumulation of things over time, against the backdrop of a “complex relationship”, which had led to the “meltdown”.
It was “overly simplistic” to characterise it simply as “rage”.
Kaur was someone who was “severely depressed, hugely anxious”. There had been socio-cultural issues which had led her to be ostracised and isolated from her community after beginning a relationship with Mr R, and there was still emotional trauma from issues related to an arranged marriage back in India.
This had all led to a “collapse in decision making” as she became “overwhelmed by emotions”.
The trigger had been seeing a recent photo of her partner with his wife – he was living with Kaur for five days a week, but staying with his wife and children on the other two days.
Kaur saw a photo of Mr R and his wife and children all dining at a restaurant, and Mr R had lied to her about the visit.
They had an argument which led to a “cascade of emotional dysfunction and cognitive overload”, Goodwin said.
However, Crown prosecutor Rebecca Mann said Judge Tompkins had all the material available to him at sentencing, and rather than having no regard to it, the “experienced” judge had assessed it and rightly determined it wasn’t relevant to the sentencing outcome.
Mann noted there had been prolonged bad driving, where Kaur had stopped, got out of the car, and then continued to chase Mrs R.
She had been effectively “lying in wait” for her, Mann said.
There was a “high degree of persistence in this course of driving”, Mann said, which didn’t support the defence’s submission of having “any link with depression and the like”.
Mann said there wasn’t the “causal nexus”, and there was nothing to suggest the judge had erred in his determinations at sentencing.
“This was deliberate reckless driving, undertaken in a targeted way,” she said.
While there may have been cultural shunning and isolation that preceded the offending, there was no evidence that it had been causative, in the Crown’s submission.
Goodwin, in reply, said the Crown was taking a “hard line” in the case.
“The Crown’s really saying you should be ignoring discount after discount,” he told Justice MacGillivray.
“Ignoring a discount for mental health, ignoring a discount for remorse, ignoring a discount for rehabilitation ... and in a sense treating Ms Kaur as having none of those issues and having done absolutely nothing.”
That was the only way to justify a four-year sentence, and it wasn’t “the situation here”.
Goodwin’s overall position was that the judge should have adopted a lower starting point, given greater discounts, and, at the end of it, imposed a sentence of home detention.
Justice MacGillivray reserved his decision.
Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.