Long jail term for eye-gouging attack
A 24-year-old who destroyed his victim’s eye in a home invasion attack wiped away tears as he was jailed for eight years.
Jordan Isle wrote a letter to sentencing Judge Jane Farish saying that since his remand in custody for sentencing he had been finding prison hard.
He wrote that he had “never been so scared in his life”, the judge said.
Isle, a father-of-two, has been finding that without alcohol and drugs clouding his brain he had been able to see his situation more clearly and he never wanted to be back where he was today.
But the judge said his remorse was for himself rather than his victim whose eye was gouged in the daytime attack at Oxford on August 10, 2013. The victim – they had been at odds over a drug deal gone wrong, or comments that Isle took exception to – was blinded in one eye, and now seems likely to lose the eye.
The victim gave evidence during the Christchurch District Court trial in April of waking during the day to find Isle attacking him in his bed, and feeling him “scooping” the eye out. He told the jury trial that he felt the eyeball pop. He now suffers from anxiety and panic attacks and has trouble sleeping.
Defence counsel Tim Twomey said that without drink and drugs in prison, Isle’s attitude and mind-set had changed almost overnight.
Isle became increasingly upset in the dock as the sentencing progressed, and was eventually wiping away tears as the length of the jail term became clear.
He got no reduction for any guilty pleas or remorse, because he had been found guilty at trial. The judge told him he would have faced a much shorter sentence if he had accepted responsibility.
But the judge did not accept a suggestion from Crown prosecutor Arpana Raj that a minimum non-parole term should be imposed.
She said she did not regard Isle as being irredeemable. “I see you as being capable of change,” she said.
He would need to undergo counselling and treatment for drug and alcohol abuse while in prison, and psychiatric counselling, if he wanted the Parole Board to consider releasing him. That would not be before he had served a third of his sentence.
The Crown had said at the time of Isle’s conviction that he had been sentenced only two months before this incident for another serious assault in which the victim had lost an eye. But yesterday, the Crown accepted that there had been a disputed facts hearing about that assault and the judge had accepted that the victim’s eye injury was not a result of anything that Isle had done.
Judge Farish said the latest assault had been a premeditated revenge attack involving a daytime home invasion against a vulnerable victim who had been asleep in bed when it began.
Isle was found guilty at trial on charges of assault with intent to injure and wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
Category: Focus
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