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R v Pomale [2021] NZDC 8775

Published 03 November 2022

Sentencing — aggravated robbery — home invasion — Crimes Act 1961 — R v Mako [2000] 2 NZLR 170 — Hay v R [2015] NZCA 329 — Barnes v R [2018] NZCA 42 — R v Karaitiana [2020] NZHC 91 — Waddington v R [2019] NZCA 440 — R v Vagaia [2018] NZHC 1225 — Stratton-Pineaha v R [2020] NZCA 50 — Piao v R [2020] NZCA 607 — R v Winitana [2019] NZHC 3229 — R v Nuku [2018] NZHC 2510. The defendant appeared for sentence on a charge of aggravated robbery. Together with three or four others who had not been identified, he had broken into a house late at night and demanded that the occupants give them money and drugs. The defendant and co-offenders took cash, several cell phones and several bottles of alcohol in the robbery, and one of the occupants was struck with the butt of a gun and threatened at gunpoint. The aggravating features of the offending were invading a home, multiple offenders, use of weapons, the fact that one of the victims was pregnant and another was a child, use of threats and violence, and premeditation. The start point for sentence was eight years' imprisonment. In mitigation the defendant's cultural report set out his violent and deprived childhood, which included being abandoned by his father at a young age. This factor reduced the sentence to six years five months' imprisonment; the Court reduced this further to four years' imprisonment to recognise the fact that the sentence was to be served cumulatively on top of an 11-year sentence that the defendant was already serving for selling methamphetamine. Judgment Date: 7 May 2021