KEY POINTS:
The mother of brutally slain pizza deliverer Michael Choy says she has to endlessly relive his death in parole hearings in a bid to keep his killers in jail.
Rita Croskery told MPs considering the Young Offenders (Serious Crimes) Bill that since 2001 she had attended an average
of six parole hearings a year "reliving the trauma".
She told the committee the six main offenders were convicted of various charges including manslaughter and murder.
Amongst them was the country's youngest convicted killer Bailey Junior Kurariki, who was 12 when Mr Choy was beaten to death with a baseball bat in 2001.
Kurariki, now 17, was sentenced to seven years' in jail in 2002 and has a parole hearing in July.
Mrs Croskery attended Kurariki's last parole hearing, part of a long and gruelling process related to the killing, which began just three months after the callous attack.
"It is very stressful...there has been no let up," Mrs Croskery said.
She supported the reduction of the age of criminality saying her son's killers had almost all had a history of repeat offending and all knew the difference between right and wrong.
One of the convicted had boasted about his rights under the law and they were "pretty much cowards who had to work together in groups".
"Kurariki began his numerous offending from the time he was eight years of age, he was never held accountable for the assaults he committed on other young people," Mrs Croskery said.
"The first time I saw him show any sign of emotion was after the six-week trial, when he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced. I think he realised he was finally being held accountable for his actions."
New Zealand First MP Ron Mark proposed the bill because he believed young offenders, in some cases only children, had been treated too leniently for a spate "of very serious and shocking crimes".
Mr Mark has proposed amending his bill so it only applied to those aged 12 and over, after it originally put forward 10 as the age of criminal responsibility.
The bill also proposed that young people charged with offences which could result in a three-month prison sentence should be dealt with in the criminal system, not the Youth Court.
Many have said this will effectively close down the Youth Court unless the bar to serious crime was raised.
- NZPA
