A High Court judge has told a man who admitted a "barbaric" attack on an elderly woman before setting fire to her home that he could not be reformed.
Brent Wellm, 44, was sentenced to preventive detention with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years when he appeared at the High Court in Auckland today.
The charges against Wellm included attempted murder, arson, threatening to kill and aggravated burglary.
The sentence followed Wellm's attack in November last year on Francis Gavin, 83, at her longtime home in suburban Howick.
Wellm tricked his way into Ms Gavin's home using a bible before attacking her. He tied her up and bound her arms and legs before attacking her with a spade and hedge clippers, an attack which only ended after Ms Gavin played dead.
Wellm then set fire to the house before leaving with jewellery. He was caught after breaking into a nearby address a few hours later.
The attack hospitalised Ms Gavin for more than three weeks. She said in a victim impact statement that her life had been ruined and she had lost several mementos of her husband's from the years they spent in the house.
Wellm's lawyer, Lorraine Smith, asked for a finite sentence, saying Wellm admitted all the charges against him at an early stage and had saved Ms Gavin the need to recount her ordeal in court.
But Justice Rhys Harrison said Wellm easily qualified for preventive detention as he had committed a string of violent offences prior to his attack on Ms Gavin.
He said Wellm's attack had been described as barbaric, but he felt it was worse.
"It reflects sadistic cruelty on a scale beyond comprehension in a civilised society."
Justice Harrison said Wellm's string of convictions "showed he had an unrelenting commitment to violent repetitive offending on a major scale" and that society needed to be protected from him.
He said Wellm was beyond reformation and only the aging process could stop him from violent offending towards anyone else.
"You should remain in custody until you are no longer able to physically beat people."
Justice Harrison also expressed disappointment that Wellm, who had absconded from home detention, was not apprehended a month before his attack on Ms Gavin when he presented himself to a non-sworn officer at the police station in Henderson, west Auckland.
As there was no record of him on the police computer, Wellm was allowed to leave.
It was explained to Justice Harrison that the parole board's notification procedure had changed, but instead of faxing information to police intelligence they instead used the old method of sending it to probation, meaning Wellm was not on the police system as an absconder.
"This still doesn't explain why the non-sworn officer sent you away," Justice Harrison told Wellm. "At the very least you should have been detained and referred to a sworn police officer.
"I can only hope that an error of this magnitude is never repeated."
West Auckland Police apologised to Ms Gavin over this incident shortly after she had been attacked.
Detective Sergeant Shaun Vickers, who investigated the attack on Ms Gavin, said outside court that Wellm's crime was a callous one and the sentence was appropriate.
