Mother with a mission

Feburary 21, 2009
The Sensible Sentencing Trust has set up in Nelson, led by a woman with a devastating tragedy in her life and a burning sense of injustice. Geoff Collett reports. -------------------- Judy Ashton is only partly joking when she brandishes two particularly dire-looking documents and says, "This is my hobby".
They're issues papers from the Law Commission. Not so many months ago, she had no idea what an issues paper was. Now, she's been poring over them - one called Compensating Crime Victims, the other Suppressing Names and Evidence.
"They're not light reading, " she observes, without needing to. "But that's what I do now. I sit down and read them and put a submission in."
To say Ashton's life has changed in the two years since her daughter Debbie died in a car crash caused by a paroled criminal would be a gross understatement. So would saying that it's been upended, shaken to its core, knocked off its axis.
"Boy, when you're hit by it in your family first- hand, you can't be blase about it. It changes your whole way of thinking - it's changed my personality. My life has been devastated."
It's set her on a mission. Discovering a previously unknown fascination with the arcane ways of lawmaking is just the tip of it. The scandal she uncovered and continues to beaver away at, surrounding the man who killed her daughter - a tangled web involving police witness protection, courts being misled, shady pasts being covered up - is only part of it, too. She's also discovered a new determination to immerse herself in what might be called the victims' rights movement, and its most prominent manifestation in this country, the Sensible Sentencing Trust.
Ashton and a small core of others have spent the past few months getting a Nelson branch of the trust off the ground. This Tuesday, the new group will have its first major public outing, with a public meeting in Tahunanui to hear from Ashton herself and the trust's founder and frontman, Garth McVicar.
They are expecting - certainly hoping for - strong interest, and the Nelson branch is part of a wave of expansion by the trust throughout the country.
Late last year, McVicar churned out another of his ceaseless press releases, this one crowing that Sensible Sentencing was "New Zealand's most successful lobby group" and claiming that 13 of its 15 "policy requests" made before the last election were going to be implemented by the new government.
This week backed up his claim: as part of the rush of new laws being put before Parliament are such proposals as "boot camps" for youth offenders, a lowering of the age at which children can be sent to the Youth Court, and the so-called "three strikes" approach to sentencing repeat violent and sexual offenders.
"We've earned our credibility, " McVicar says down the phone from Auckland. "That's definitely being reflected in the membership and the political influence that the organisation is now having."
That Nelson is now on the bandwagon is largely a credit to Judy Ashton, he says - someone who has "proven they've got the X-factor".
The question has to be asked, though: is Nelson really in need of the often strident, frequently alarming Sensible Sentencing message? (Sample recent press release headlines: "May the dogs rot in hell", "Boot camps got to be better than the status quo", "Rapist paroled in striking distance of victim and schools".) The region is hardly a hotbed of crime, and certainly (and thankfully) not the vicious, random murders and sex attacks that have been Sensible Sentencing's meat and potatoes.
McVicar acknowledges this, but has a warning. "A lot of people out there committing crimes look for exactly that environment to go to - to grow their organisations, if you like.
"Crime is organised - there's no doubt about that - so they look for a fairly sleepy, laid-back environment, and they will go and build their network there. So hopefully our timing is good, and hopefully we can keep Nelson with exactly the reputation it now has, as one of the safest places in the country."
Ashton has a slightly different take. "Personally, I think Nelson is very protected and ignorant of the crimes that happen in other areas of New Zealand." She sees signs that the problems are getting a toehold here - mindless thuggery by youngsters, petty vandalism - minor stuff that leads to major stuff, she argues.
"I don't want to cause anxiety but I do think people need to be aware that if you're getting an increased petty crime rate in your city, before long it's going to get worse, and if you want to be serious about it, nip it in the bud by getting behind the trust and helping change the laws".
Whatever the truth of Nelson's vulnerability to crime, Ashton knows more than most about being shaken out of complacency. Her daughter's death and the subsequent scandal have been well aired now, but the short version is that Debbie was killed in December 2006, in a head-on crash with a car being driven at speed on the wrong side of the road by a disqualified driver, Jonathan Barclay, on the so-called switchbacks on Paton Rd, near the Ashton family home in Hope.
Barclay fled the scene and laid low for several days, while others in the car lied to cover for him. Then Debbie's grieving family discovered that he had recently moved to Nelson with a new identity, given to him under the police witness protection programme; and that a few weeks before the crash, he had appeared in court on other charges. He was on parole but used his new identity to avoid being identified in court as a parolee, and avoided being sent back to the slammer.
It took a ministerial inquiry for much of the detail to come out. As Judy Ashton puts it now, the clear verdict was that Debbie's death "could have, should have been prevented".
The fallout continues. Among the unresolved business is the part of Barclay's lawyer, Mark Dollimore, in not alerting the court to his client's identity during the earlier appearances. But there will be more, Ashton promises - things that "one day, I will get to the bottom of. I have to unravel them . . . because I know there are so many unanswered questions. It's not fair to Debbie that I don't get to the bottom of them".
This explains her new-found "hobby" of studying stuffy legal documents, writing submissions, appearing before official hearings and committees, arguing for law changes.
"There's something in me now that I'm not prepared to accept the stuff-ups in the system that allowed her death.
"Until such time that I see things in place and know that they're working, that will prevent another needless death, that's what I'm doing."
As much as it's a lonely, solitary journey - one shared and understood properly only within her immediate family, with her husband Ted and surviving adult children - her discovery of the Sensible Sentencing Trust has helped her to cope.
"It was literally my lifesaver during that time, " she says as she recounts how she stumbled across the organisation's website while searching for someone who might be able to give her some independent advice, shortly before the results of the ministerial inquiry into Debbie's death were to be made public.
McVicar responded almost immediately to a lengthy e-mail she sent him explaining the case and her situation, with an invitation to a workshop he was hosting on his Hawke's Bay farm for selected Sensible Sentencing members, to learn about dealing with the media.
The experience of meeting other victims, ordinary people whose lives had been shockingly upended by crime, was an awakening. "I can't find a word to describe it. It's a bonding - it's a oneness."
While this lucid, intelligent woman is clearly driven, she hardly comes across as the "hang 'em high" type which the lazier stereotypes of Sensible Sentencing might suggest. Yes, she subscribes to its view that the rights are all tipped in the offenders' favour, but she is personally wounded by some of the invective the organisation attracts from its critics.
"It's not pleasant some of the things that are said about the trust, and I get very hurt when I read some of the things that are written about Garth. I think, 'if you people only knew what a victim's life is like and how Garth has so committed the last eight years towards making things better, you might reconsider what you're saying'.
"I answered a blog one day a couple of weeks ago, and I spent probably over an hour and a half replying because I was so upset with what I read, and I got back another reply and I thought, 'No, this is stupid, I'm never going to change those people's way of thinking'. My time is better put into doing things that are beneficial'."
The next hurdle she and her family will face comes next month when Barclay comes up for his first parole hearing, having served one-third of his 5 1/2-year sentence for killing Debbie.
Judy Ashton will be attending the hearing and opposing parole, arguing that she cannot see how 22 months in jail will have changed Barclay, especially given his track record of recidivism.
"It worries us that he's going to be let out again under similar circumstances as when he was relocated to Nelson, and I'm afraid I haven't got a lot of confidence in people that if he offends, he's going to be called straight back to jail . . .
"I can't sit back and not do something when I've seen a horrendous injustice, so that's what's motivating me. I'll go as far as I can on the issues surrounding Debbie's death.
"After that, I firmly believe that what the trust are doing is necessary. If we didn't have so much crime, if criminals didn't want to go to prison because of harsher sentences, we wouldn't need the Sensible Sentencing Trust."