New Zealand man sentenced to 7 years in prison under 3 strikes law

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New Zealand man sentenced to 7 years in prison under 3 strikes law

A man who was sentenced to seven years in prison for kissing a woman in the street under New Zealand's controversial three strikes law has been awarded $450,000 in compensation by the government.

Daniel Fitzgerald, a man with significant mental health issues, was charged with indecent assault after he approached and kissed a stranger in a Wellington street. He had committed two similar crimes and so was sentenced under New Zealand's recently repealed laws that required the judge to give a maximum sentence of seven years for the offence despite the mitigating factors, unless it was manifestly unjust to do so.

In 2021, when Fitzgerald had been in jail for more than four years, the supreme court ruled that the three strikes law had resulted in a sentence so grossly disproportionate that it breached his rights. He was sentenced to six months.

The compensation outlined in the high court decision on Thursday was for the four years he had already served.

Judge Rebecca Ellis said in her ruling that Fitzgerald's sentence was not simply disproportionate, but grossly so, in breach of one of his most fundamental rights. The judge also found that the Crown prosecutor, who had repeatedly declined to downgrade to lesser charges, had failed to exercise the prosecutorial discretion to avoid the risk of Fitzgerald receiving a grossly disproportionate punishment.

New Zealand's Labour government repealed the law that had been brought in by the previous National Act governing coalition earlier this year.

The justice minister, Kiritapu Allan, said there was no evidence that it worked. It failed the taxpayer, and failed victims because it ensured they were in the system for longer, because it failed to be a deterrent to offenders. National and Act, who created the law when they were last in government, said they would reinstate the law if re-elected, and that it meant that the worst repeat offenders spent longer in prison.