A 21-year-old refugee convicted of kidnap and indecent assault has been sentenced to 12 months imprisonment, to be served in a psychiatric hospital.
Benjamin Mangirane, a Rwandan-born unemployed man, tried to pick up and carry away a seven-year-old girl from a suburban Wellington street.
He last month admitted the charges, along with charges of trespass, breaching intensive supervision conditions, breaching community work conditions and three charges of indecent assault.
He changed his plea to guilty after a court-ordered psychiatric assessment found he was fit to stand trial.
On March 28, Mangirane came up behind a seven-year-old girl who was waiting at a set of suburban traffic lights. He picked her up, put her over his shoulder and tried to carry her away.
The screaming child attracted the attention of other people who came to her aid on a Wellington South street, before Mangirane put her down and fled.
In the preceding weeks, Mangirane had approached a 10-year-old girl, who was playing in a school playground.
He asked her several questions, before unfastening his trousers, and the girl ran away.
The indecency charges related to three incidents where Mangirane put his hands inside his pants and masturbated in public.
At sentencing today, Judge Peter Butler said a psychiatrist had diagnosed Mangirane as probably schizophrenic, and his condition was exacerbated by his use of alcohol and cannabis.
Mangirane had had a "disjointed life", Judge Butler said.
His family fled to Uganda from Rwanda in the early 1990s, before moving to New Zealand in 2002.
He had been separated from his father, who supported him in court today, for several years when he came to New Zealand, and his mother had died.
Judge Butler sentenced him to 12 months' imprisonment on the kidnapping charge, with two-month sentences for indecent assault and indecent acts, and shorter sentences for the other charges, to be served concurrently.
He would be detained in hospital as a special patient for 12 months, or until doctors believed he had improved enough to go to prison.
