Preventive detention for street sex attack

By David Clarkson at the Ashburton Court House. Updated Report.

A judge has put a permanent end to Tony Shane Tonihi’s sadistic – and rapidly worsening – attacks on women.

Justice Christine French imposed preventive detention on the 42-year-old and Tonihi will only be released from prison if he poses no more risks.

That seems a remote possibility for a man who was described in court as having “cognitive distortions and a sense of entitlement to sex”.

A psychological report prepared for his sentencing spoke of his sadistic sexual interests. The report stated: “He appears to require an increasing level of violence to achieve sexual gratification.”

Justice French also imposed a non-parole term of seven-and-a-half years for Tonihi’s sexual violation of the woman, and intentionally injuring her.

Defence counsel Rupert Glover had argued for a finite prison term instead of the open-ended preventive detention, but Justice French said: “I would be failing in my duty to the community were I to impose a finite prison sentence.”

Tonihi was assessed as a high or medium-high risk of reoffending, and he committed his latest predatory attack when he had only been out of prison six weeks on parole after serving time for another sex attack.

Tonihi’s horrifying life story led to a horrifying sex attack on a 20-year-old woman walking alone on Hereford Street late on a Saturday night last November, when Tonihi had been using cannabis and drinking.

He saw her walking alone – she was on her way home from work – and stalked her for two blocks from about Latimer Square, looking for a front yard where he could take her.

He told a psychologist that when he saw her he was “full of hate and anger and thought then of raping her”.

He even crossed the road to put her off her guard, but then crossed back again and grabbed her, dragging her into a front yard where he raped her, violated her anally, beat her and choked her into unconsciousness.

When the woman complained that he was hurting her, Tonihi told her that it was “supposed to hurt”. He threatened to kill her if she screamed.

The attack was stopped by a householder who heard the noise. Tonihi ran off, but was caught when he returned to retrieve some of his belongings.

The woman was left with injuries from the sex attack, cuts and bruises all over her body, facial swelling that lasted two weeks, and a bite on her thumb. She had thought she would die during the attack. She is now anxious and distrustful, and has nightmares.

Glover said Tonihi was a man of few words, but was “shattered by the harm he has caused”. He was a sexually damaged man who had recently come to terms with the recovered memory of a sex attack when he was aged four.

He had begun drinking at age three, in an abusive household where violence, beatings, and alcohol were the norm. He had been sexually assaulted by a friend of his father, and had later stepped in to deflect his father’s violence from his mother onto himself. “He learned to switch off from the pain inflicted on him and to stop caring.”

Crown prosecutor Sally Carter said it was extremely serious offending. Tonihi had not accessed any of the help available to him after his prison release. “He is effectively seeing himself as a victim and not genuinely understanding the effect of his offending,” she said.

Justice French noted that Tonihi had 40 convictions, including several attacks on women and a child. He had been convicted for attacks on two prostitutes, and one of these convictions led to the sentence he had just finished weeks before the latest attack.

He had a most unhappy childhood with a drunken father in a violent, abusive household. He was binge drinking at age 15 and socialising at a gang house where he witnessed violence and saw women denigrated and gang raped.

She said the reports were concerned about his rapid return to offending after his release, his inability to manage factors that contributed to the offending, and his increasingly reckless attacks.

This led her to rule out a finite jail term. “There is a real possibility you might be released while still a significant risk to the community,” she said. She hoped that prison authorities would be able to provide him with treatment that would assist him.

No-one was at the High Court sitting in the Ashburton Court House to see Tonihi sentenced.