Before sentencing 31-year-old Kereti Alan Henry in the Dunedin District Court yesterday, Judge Kevin Phillips handed him pictures of the injured man.
"I want you to look closely at those photographs. That’s what you did to that man when you beat him up," he said.
The victim’s mother told the court in a statement that only two bones in her son’s face were unbroken.
He needed eight plates in his face and three months after the incident was still unable to chew or bite, she said.
"The mother says she can live with the nightmare or the vision of her bloody and beaten son but the man she knew as a son has been taken from her," the judge said.
After a brief relationship with a woman, Henry had suspicions she was seeing someone new.
On February 6, he cycled to her Milton home and saw a van parked outside before entering the property through an unlocked door.
He turned on his ex-girlfriend’s bedroom light and found her in bed with another man.
"You entirely lost control," Judge Phillips said.
Henry immediately struck, knocking the man unconscious with a blow to the back of the head.
The woman intervened but could not stop the defendant walking to where the victim was lying and stomping on his head.
A flatmate was woken by the screams and together they ushered Henry outside.
They tried to persuade him to leave but instead he returned to the bedroom and continued to punch the victim in the head.
"He was entirely unable to defend himself in any way," the judge said.
"You purposely went into that house knowing that man was in there and knowing that the light was off. You executed what you thought was retribution for his temerity in forming a relationship with a woman you described as your woman when she wasn’t at all."
Henry was originally charged with injuring with intent to cause grievous bodily harm (carrying a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment); when it was reduced by police to injuring with intent to injure (five-year maximum), he pleaded guilty.
Judge Phillips was "bewildered" by the amendment.
"The level of charge you face is far too low," he said.
Henry got 12 months’ home detention — the maximum such sentence — and was ordered to pay the victim $1500.
For drink-driving he committed three weeks before the attack, he was fined $700 and disqualified from driving for six months.
