KEY POINTS:
A man jailed for at least 21 years for the brutal murder of his former partner and her new boyfriend is to be given expensive treatment for leukaemia angering family of one of the victims.
Jason Reihana, 35, was sentenced in the High Court in Rotorua last month
to life in jail with a non-parole period of 21 years. He was convicted of murdering Teresa Gunn, the mother of his two sons, and her new boyfriend Andrew Grabner in a frenzied knife attack.
The Sunday News reported today Reihana has leukaemia and will receive a bone-marrow transplant - at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of around $1 million.
The treatment has angered Ms Gunn's father David Gunn, of Hamilton. "He has taken two lives, why should we save his?
"Why spend that sort of money on a crim?" he asked. "There are lots of people on waiting lists more deserving for treatment.
"I'd prefer Reihana just rots in jail. He took the lives of two innocent people. Why should we waste money on him?"
The newspaper said Reihana would spend six weeks in Auckland hospital for the transplant, to be followed by six months of outpatient care - with prison escorts to and from the hospital every second day - and then intermittent visits for 18 more months.
The Corrections Department had costed his post-care at "hundreds of thousands of dollars", including providing at least two guards, 24 hours a day, while he is in hospital. If he presents a problem there, three guards will be needed.
Sensible Sentencing Trust spokesman Garth McVicar said Reihana did not deserve the treatment.
"There has to be a balance. The poor old taxpayer has to pour huge amounts of money into looking after these criminals."
At the sentencing last month Justice Raynor Asher said Reihana's two children were the "two other major victims".
"They now have no mother. It is a cruel aspect of this case that they also have no father in their day-to-day lives. They have to live with the fact that their father murdered their mother," Justice Asher said.
Reihana's fatal knife attacks on Ms Gunn, 27, and Mr Grabner, 39, in Ms Gunn's Tauranga house on December 11, 2005, were frenzied and brutal, he said.
"It is hard to imagine a more violent invasion of a home than an approach by stealth and the sudden smashing down of the door."
Justice Asher said Reihana had a degree of premeditation in the week leading up to the murders, after she told him their five-year relationship was over.
"The break-up of a relationship is just a fact of life, a fact that everyone in our society lives with."
- NZPA
