Longer sentences await those who target the corner dairy as the Government moves to make such circumstances an aggravating factor in sentencing.
The Herald understands the policy - part of the National-Act coalition agreement - will be part of a suite of Government measures announced today designed to lengthen sentences for certain crimes by shifting the way judges are handing down sentences.
The announcement will also include limits on the use of mitigating factors - including remorse, and youth - which can lead to sentencing discounts, as well as a sliding scale to ensure offenders pleading guilty during their trial don’t get the same discount as an offender who entered the same plea at the earliest reasonable opportunity.
These are likely to ruffle legal feathers because they are contrary to the wide discretion that judges have on which factors are relevant and to what extent, depending on the unique circumstances of each case. This acknowledges the expertise of the bench - do politicians know better? - though there are principles of consistency to ensure similar sentences are given in similar cases.
One focus of today’s announcement will be on retail crime, in particular crimes where the worker and/or their family are in a dairy or store where people are working alone, or have an adjoining home.
The National-Act agreement commits to making such circumstances - where the “victim is working sole charge or adjacent to a dwelling” - an aggravating factor during sentencing.
The move will be welcomed by industry groups, including the Dairy and Business Owners’ Group, which released police data showing more than 400 retail crimes every day on average in 2023, with six staff a day complaining to police they had been violently or sexually assaulted on the job.
Act leader David Seymour campaigned on this policy in July last year when he visited Jyotis Dairy in Mt Roskill, where dairy owner Bhavana Patel had been brutally attacked by hammer-wielding robbers as she stood behind the counter.
Act MP Parmjeet Parmar told the Herald: “It’s heartbreaking to see shopkeepers putting themselves inside cages so criminals can’t get behind the counter. This law change recognises that people working alone are particularly vulnerable, as are families living alongside the family shop.”
She said sentencing decisions for violent crimes have “become inadequate because the principles of the Sentencing Act are stacked against victims”.
“The Coalition Government is rebalancing sentencing back towards the dignity of the victim, requiring courts to take into account any information provided to it concerning a victim’s needs and circumstances.”
Whether the policy would have any deterrent effect is questionable, given that criminologists say deterrence works better where there is a higher certainty of being caught, which is more likely in white-collar crimes.
And while retail crime has been increasing - there were just under 4000 reports of retail crime in October 2017, jumping to 10,109 incidents in October 2022 - much of that has been ascribed to the software Auror, which makes it easier to report retail crime.
The app-based programme was introduced in 2015 to make it easier for retail chain stores, supermarkets and petrol stations to report shoplifting and theft to police, particularly for goods less than $500 in value. The majority of these crimes were previously unreported.
In 2017, 15% of retail crime was reported through Auror, jumping to 65% by 2022.
While supermarket crimes wouldn’t ordinarily qualify under this policy, Foodstuffs say serious incidents - such as burglary, assault, robbery, and other aggressive, violent, and threatening behaviour - have gone up by 36% year on year between February and April.
Police have another way of measuring retail crime, which costs retailers $1 billion a year, by looking at the number of victimisations across three categories:
Ram raids, meanwhile, peaked two years ago when there were 86 occurrences in August 2022, more than the total of 67 ram raids in the first four months of 2024.
The Government has committed to limiting the total discount a judge can give on a sentence to 40%, though it’s unclear if this will form part of today’s announcement.
Limiting the use of mitigating factors at sentencing, including an offender’s remorse and age, will be in the mix. Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith, when in Opposition, floated the idea of one-off discounts for remorse and youth, which wouldn’t be available for the offender if they committed further crimes.
He was responding to the public outcry when Tauranga teenager Jayden Meyer was sentenced to nine months home detention for raping four women and sexually violating another.
Youth being a mitigating factor is predicated on the evidence that the brain doesn’t fully develop until age 25; younger people are more susceptible to peer pressure and not fully aware of risk, while the younger they are, the more capacity for rehabilitation there is.
Goldsmith has also previously told the Herald he wants to incentivise early guilty pleas to help unclog the court system, and this is understood to be a 25% discount at one end of the scale, with a 5%, if the guilty plea is entered during trial.
Whether this will be a prescribed mandatory regime or a presumptive guideline is yet to be revealed.
The Supreme Court has warned against the former, favouring judicial discretion. Why should the maximum discount be given to a defendant who entered an early plea, regardless of the strength of the case against them? Ignoring this, the Supreme Court said, would likely lead to “unjustified windfall benefits ... to those who have little choice but to plead guilty”.
“Also, it would put pressure on an accused to plead guilty for reasons that are unprincipled. In some cases, pressure of this kind could lead to a guilty plea being entered in haste by someone who may not be guilty.”
Today, the Three Strikes 2.0 bill is also expected to have its first reading.
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.
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