R v Warren
[2018] NZHC 1370
•11 June 2018
IN THE HIGH COURT OF NEW ZEALAND GREYMOUTH REGISTRY
I TE KŌTI MATUA O AOTEAROA MĀWHERA ROHE
CRI-2017-018-000681 [2018] NZHC 1370
THE QUEEN v
GEORGE SEAN WARREN
Hearing: 8 June 2018 Appearances:
C Boshier for the Crown
P J Shamy and B P Shamy for the Defendant
Judgment:
11 June 2018
SENTENCING REMARKS OF NATION J
[1] I have carefully read again the victim impact reports which were provided to me before the sentencing indication. I have also received some information from Hayley Williams’ sons. Please thank them for what they wrote. I can see how hard it must have been for them to do so but that is true for everyone who has provided statements. In the interests of the emotional welfare and privacy of the children, I make an order under s 27(2)(b) of the Victims’ Rights Act 2002 that the statements of the children and accompanying material are not to be released to the media.
[2] Mr Warren, you and the family of Hayley Williams know what your sentence is going to be. As you requested, I indicated to you what your sentence would be if you pleaded guilty to Hayley Williams’ murder. You did eventually plead guilty on the basis of that indication. Although you know what the sentence is going to be, it is
R v WARREN [2018] NZHC 1370 [11 June 2018]
important that I explain in public and in this community what you are being sentenced for and how I have arrived at your sentence.
[3] You pleaded guilty on the basis of an agreed summary of facts as to what happened. That summary is today being made available to the media, but I point out to the media that it is only information in the redacted summary of facts that can be published. Certain details in the summary of facts on which you pleaded guilty are being suppressed. Those details do not, in any way, change the details of the murder as far as you are concerned.
[4] On 28 September 2017, you turned up at Hayley Williams’ address uninvited. She alleged you indecently assaulted her in front of one of her children. In an interview soon afterwards, her son told a specialist child interviewer that a scary man came to his house and was trying to touch his mother and was saying really gross stuff to her.
[5] Hayley Williams made a complaint to the Police. On 2 October 2017, you were arrested and charged with indecent assault. You were released on Court bail conditions. These included that you were not to have contact with Hayley Williams or go within 300 metres of her home address.
[6] You were incensed at the charge and on several occasions between 2 October 2017 and 22 October 2017 made comments to the effect that you felt like killing her.
[7] On Friday 20 October 2017, you met with your lawyer. You told the Police that your lawyer told you the maximum prison sentence for the charge was seven years and it was a three strikes offence. Between that Friday and Sunday you continued to internally rage about the matter.
[8] During the afternoon of Sunday 22 October 2017, with an associate, you obtained a loaded .308 rifle. At about 4.00 pm, you drove to Hayley Williams’ address. You approached the house carrying the firearm. Ms Williams, hearing a car approach, went to check on a 16 month old baby who was in a car seat in her vehicle on the driveway. You aggressively confronted her and demanded that she get in the car. She
refused. You became angry, grabbed her by the hair and struck her five to nine times around the head and face area. To protect herself, Hayley Williams cowered, began pleading with you and said she would drop the indecent assault charge. You presented the rifle at her, twice pulling the trigger. The weapon failed to fire. She said “Sean, I’ve got the five kids inside”. With that, you cocked the rifle again and checked a round had entered the chamber successfully. You pulled the trigger a third time, shooting her in the neck so as to rapidly cause her death. One of her sons saw the start of this and saw you point a gun at his mother before running to a neighbour’s house for help. Another son had hidden in a wardrobe as part of a prearranged safety plan. After the shot was fired, he came out of the wardrobe to find his mother killed in the driveway. Another child saw you arrive and point a gun at your victim.
[9] You then went on the run before being apprehended by the Armed Defenders Squad 23 hours later.
[10] On being arrested, you made numerous spontaneous comments confessing to what you had done. In those statements, there was no hint of remorse. There was no hint of you having any sympathy for Hayley’s children. It was just an angry rant as, in some warped way, you sought to justify what you had done. You told the Police that murder was about intent and premeditation, that you went over there to shoot her in the leg but you knew, because you pulled the trigger a third time, you were going to be found guilty of murder.
[11] You told the Police that, rather than face a sentence of three and a half years on an indecent assault charge, which you denied, you would rather go away for ten years for something you did do. Well, Mr Warren, your sentence will be life imprisonment and that means you are going to be in prison for much longer than 10 years.
[12] In careful and firm submissions for you, at the time you asked for a sentence indication, your counsel Mr Shamy suggested that what you did was not the result of calm and rational planning but the consequence of your irrational anger at the situation you found yourself in, facing a charge of indecent assault. There is some truth in that
but it does not change the nature and consequence of what you did, knowing what you were doing.
[13]What you did can only be described as inhuman and cowardly.
[14] I need to stress that the sentence you face for this murder is life imprisonment. In deciding whether you can ever be released, the paramount consideration of the Parole Board will be the safety of the community. Section 28 of the Parole Act 2002 says that, in deciding whether to release you on parole, the Board must bear in mind that you have no entitlement to be released on parole. A Board may release you on parole only if it is satisfied on reasonable grounds that, if released on parole, you will not pose an undue risk to the safety of the community. In considering whether you pose an undue risk, the Board will have to consider both the likelihood of your further offending and the nature and seriousness of any likely subsequent offending.
[15] Present indications are that it will be difficult for you, even after a minimum term of imprisonment, to satisfy the Board that you should be granted parole. I say that because of the particular circumstances of this offending, the way it was caused by your irrational anger and the way you have justified to yourself what you did. The Parole Board will have your pre-sentence report from the probation officer. Corrections assess your current risk of causing harm as very high and the likelihood of your reoffending as very high. The reasons for that assessment are clear in the report.
[16] When you spoke to the Police following your arrest, you also acknowledged the way, with your then state of mind, it was not just Hayley Williams who was at risk of being killed at the time she was murdered. Some of what you said is in the summary of facts but I do need to go on record as saying that, if and when you are ever considered as potentially eligible for parole, those providing advice to the Parole Board should obtain a transcript of everything that you said to the Police following your arrest.
[17] With a sentence of life imprisonment, even if you are granted parole, your rights will be restricted forever. You would always be under the oversight of the Parole
Board and subject to their controls over, for instance, where you might live. There would always be the potential for you to be recalled to prison to carry on serving your life sentence if you were to commit further criminal offences.
[18] So, Mr Warren, if you ever wish to be seriously considered for parole, you must change the way you think about yourself and about other people. The first step in that should be to recognise the enormity of what you did, how what you did to Hayley Williams was totally undeserved and of the way you have deprived her family of a mother, a sister and a daughter. You told the Probation officer that you have grandparents and uncles and aunts, and you regret that you will never see them again because of your long incarceration. Well, you alone are responsible for that but your actions have meant that Hayley Williams’ young children, who were entirely innocent in all of this, will, as a result of your actions, never see their mother again. If you now regret that you will not see your grandparents again, perhaps a time might come when you are capable of being sorry for the fact that you are the reason Hayley Williams’ children, her parents, her family will not see her again.
[19] I am required to fix a minimum term of imprisonment that you will have to serve before you can even be considered for parole. Through your lawyer, you accepted, when you sought a sentence indication, that you would be sentenced to life imprisonment. The issue then, on which I received submissions at the time I gave a sentence indication, was over what the minimum term of imprisonment had to be.
[20] Section 104 Sentencing Act 2002 says the Court must impose a minimum period of imprisonment of at least 17 years in certain specified circumstances, unless it is satisfied that it would manifestly unjust to do so. (Mr Warren, I’ve still got more to go through, I have to go through this so you may remain seated.) In this regard, I need to repeat what I said when giving my sentencing indication.
[21] Your counsel, Mr Shamy, argued, as he has reminded me today, that, what you did could not be considered the sort of “worst of the worst” murders that would require you to serve a minimum period of imprisonment of 17 years under s 104 of the Sentencing Act 2002. He argued that the minimum term of imprisonment would be 13 to 15 years. He also argued that, if I did consider s 104 applied, the minimum term
should be just the 17 years referred to in that section. As I said in my indication, saying “just 17 years” is perhaps not appropriate – 17 years is 17 years. You are aged 45. With a minimum term of imprisonment of 17 years, you will not be eligible to be considered for parole until you are aged 62.
[22] I was and remain satisfied that, pursuant to s 104 of the Sentencing Act and the criteria that are referred to in that section, the minimum term of imprisonment will have to be at least 17 years.
[23] You killed your victim because she made a complaint to the Police and they charged you with indecent assault. You chose to kill her in an irrational and violent rage. What you did subverted the course of justice because it resulted in her not being able to give evidence against you on the charge of indecent assault.
[24] You shot your victim after two shots had misfired. She was pleading with you to spare her for the sake of her children and said she would withdraw her complaint of indecent assault. After shooting her, you left her bleeding profusely and fatally wounded on the driveway outside her home, for her body to be discovered by a young child. Even if you did not know that was how her body was going to be discovered, you knew that those were the circumstances in which you left her, where she could be discovered, so fatally injured, by one of her children. I consider this was a murder committed with a high level of callousness.
[25] This murder was committed through your breaching a condition of bail that you were not to have contact with the victim or go within 300 metres of her address. While she was not killed within her home, the shooting occurred immediately outside it.
[26] In those circumstances, in accordance with s 104, a minimum sentence of 17 years has to be imposed unless this would result in a manifest injustice. As Mr Shamy acknowledged, that was not a consideration in your case, so the minimum term of imprisonment had to be at least 17 years.
[27] I was and am however required to arrive at an appropriate minimum term of imprisonment, first by having regard to all aggravating and mitigating features of the actual crime. There are no mitigating features. The aggravating features are those I have already mentioned. There was also a real degree of premeditation and planning over several weeks before the murder. You commented to several associates that you should just kill the victim. On the day she died, you first walked some distance to an associate’s address and then had that person drive you to a different address where you obtained a loaded rifle. At that address, you spoke of your displeasure with the victim because of the indecent assault charge. Some two hours after that, you arrived at the victim’s address and shot her.
[28] Taking those aggravating features of the offending into account, the starting point minimum term of imprisonment for murder would be 18 years. I then had to consider whether there should be any uplift or discount for aggravating or mitigating features relating to you personally.
[29] At the time I gave the sentencing indication, I did not have the benefit of a Corrections Department report as I do now, but I proceeded on the basis there were no mitigating circumstances relating to you personally. As I said in my indication, there was nothing in the facts before me to suggest that you had real remorse for what you did or for those, including children, who had suffered so greatly because of that. I do now have the benefit of a pre-sentence report but it simply confirms that I was correct in my assessment. There are no mitigating features relating to you personally.
[30] There are significant aggravating features relating to you personally. You are aged 45. You have a significant history of convictions for crimes of violence going back to aggravated robbery and aggravated assault in 1992. You have been sentenced to imprisonment for offending on numerous occasions. You have convictions for unlawful possession of firearms from 2012 and earlier convictions for aggravated assault with a firearm and two convictions for aggravated robbery using a firearm in 1998. You were sentenced to nine months’ intensive supervision on 18 May 2017 on a charge of breaching a protection order and were subject to that sentence when your victim was killed. I accepted, I think, when I gave my indication that, because of credits you had on that sentence, it had actually come to an end.
[31] Because of your criminal record, there would be a further uplift of one year, resulting in an adjusted minimum term of 19 years’ imprisonment.
[32] You were also on bail on a condition that you not go to your victim’s address at the time she died, but I have already taken that into account in arriving at a starting point of 18 years for the offending.
[33] The Crown submitted that a starting point sentence for the offending should be 19 years, that there should have been an uplift of one to two years because of your previous convictions, and there should be some limited credit for a guilty plea. They referred to Court of Appeal comments that the typical range of discounts provided for a guilty plea, in cases where s 104 applies, is between one and two years.1
[34] Having considered the matters which they advanced in support of that higher starting point, but also the matters addressed for you by your counsel, I arrived at a minimum starting point sentence of 19 years’ imprisonment. In doing that, I was mindful of the fact that your actual sentence would be life imprisonment and, for the reasons I discussed earlier, the minimum term I set would not necessarily be the time you would be spending in prison. At best, from your point of view, it would just be a minimum.
[35] Having arrived at that starting point minimum term of 19 years, I then considered how I would recognise the value of a guilty plea, as our Supreme Court has confirmed I am required to do.2 A guilty plea has some real benefit for those witnesses who would otherwise have had to give evidence at your trial. With a guilty plea, you would be accepting responsibility for what occurred and doing what you can to avoid the real burden of a trial to the State and all those who are the victims of what happened.
[36] On the other hand, I noted there was nothing to suggest that a guilty plea would be an expression of remorse. The evidence against you appeared to be overwhelming. Your counsel had said in his written submissions that, in reality, there was little, as he
1 Skilling v R [2011] NZCA 462 at [19]; R v Baker [2007] NZCA 277 at [27]; R v McSweeney [2007] NZCA 147 at [10].
2 Hessell v R [2010] NZSC 135.
put it, “no” attempt to get away with murder. There was a full confession to the Police officer soon after your victim was killed. The discount I indicated I would give you for a guilty plea was two years, reducing the minimum term of imprisonment to 17 years.
[37] You found it difficult to actually enter that plea of guilty. You were fortunate that, on two occasions, I extended the time for you to do so but your guilty plea was entered in response to the sentence indication and had to be recognised as a guilty plea at an early stage in the proceedings. You are getting the benefit of that discount. This means that your minimum term of imprisonment will be 17 years.
[38] Although there has been publicity about a potential change to this, current legislation provides for particular sentences to be imposed for certain offending where there has been previous offending and a person has been warned of the consequences which further offending would have - the three strikes legislation. Murder is a crime for which you must be given such a warning.
The sentence
[39] Mr Warren, please stand. On the charge of murder, to which you have pleaded guilty, you are sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of imprisonment that you must serve of 17 years.
First warning
[40] Given your conviction for murder, you are now subject to the three strikes law. I am going to give you a warning of the consequences of another serious violence conviction. You will also be given a written notice which contains a list of these ‘serious violent offences’.
1. If you are convicted of any one or more serious violent offences other than murder committed after this warning and if a Judge imposes a sentence of imprisonment, then you will serve that sentence without parole or early release.
2. If you are convicted of murder committed after this warning then you must be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole unless it would be manifestly unjust to do so. In that event, the Judge must sentence you to a minimum term of imprisonment.
[41]On the charge of indecent assault, you are discharged under s 147.
Solicitors:
Raymond Donnelly & Co., Christchurch P J Shamy, Barrister, Christchurch.
4
0