Changes to the bail laws late last year would have probably meant a violent offender such as Haiden Mark Davis would have not got bail, Justice Minister Simon Power said today.
Davis was yesterday found guilty of murder by a jury and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum non-parole period of 10 years.
He was on bail when he killed Auckland Grammar School student Augustine Borrell with a stab wound to his heart in the Auckland suburb of Herne Bay in September 2007.
Davis had gone looking for trouble.
The jury was not told during the trial that when Davis murdered Mr Borrell he was on bail for other violent offending and had twice breached his bail conditions.
He was also on bail while charged with Mr Borrell's murder.
The previous government changed bail laws to make it easier for offenders to get non-custodial bail, unless they presented a significant risk to the community.
After the election National toughened up bail laws.
Mr Power said he was not a judge, but he believed it would now be harder for an offender like Davis to get bail.
"Certainly the new law would have been tougher than the previous regime," Mr Power said.
"The list of previous convictions, as I understand them, would have meant a different threshold would have been required to have been met and that would have been a harder threshold to meet." Prime Minister John Key said he was "fairly confident" Davis would not have got bail under the new law.
Mr Key and Mr Power said the Government also wanted greater monitoring of bail conditions to insure they were met.
Labour leader Phil Goff, a former justice minister, said the justice system had let the Borrell family down.
"I find it totally unacceptable that a man who was on conditions of bail could have been allowed to breach those conditions," Mr Goff said.
The courts had discretion to give bail and the judge had used it "obviously wrongly" in this instance against the pleadings of the Crown solicitor and the police, Mr Goff said.
