In sentencing William Alexander Hamish Grant in the Dunedin District Court yesterday, Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft told Grant he wanted to send him and the community, especially the young, a strong message the behaviour he had displayed was "totally unacceptable".
"Violence is never acceptable, especially in a domestic context, and a line must be drawn in the sand."
Grant was transferred to the district court for sentencing after earlier not denying in youth court a charge of causing grievous bodily harm to his 15-year-old former girlfriend with intent to do so.
Judge Becroft said Grant had recently broken up with the girl, whose identity is suppressed, when he met her by chance in central Dunedin on December 22 last year and invited her back to his mother's house, where he knew no-one would be home.
While in the bath about 8.30pm or 9pm, the victim started chanting as a joke.
"You quickly, after being annoyed over a trivial matter, escalated into a deep, black, violent rage you were incapable of controlling," the judge said.
He started beating her and choked her until she blacked out.
When she came to, she found he had flipped her over and was trying to put her head under the water. There was a violent struggle. She managed to dislodge the plug, which, the judge said, possibly saved her life.
She got out of the bath, but on the floor of the bathroom Grant punched and kicked her in the head, kneed her in the face and continued to choke her. He picked her up and threw her from wall to wall, during which she recalled hitting the bath taps.
She was screaming at him to stop.
He grabbed her head and starting smacking it into the bathroom cabinet, and stomped on her head and neck several times, grabbing a container or soap dispenser and smashing it into her head six or seven times.
He bit her nose and gouged her eyes, before grabbing a hair comb with a long, pointed handle and stabbing her first just above her eye, then in the chest.
The comb's handle broke off and was lodged in her chest.
He then stopped and turned on the lights, asking himself what he had done, the judge said.
The victim made her way to a bed, where Grant pulled out the end of the comb. She asked Grant to call an ambulance, which he did not, and then she either passed out or went to sleep.
When she woke several hours later and repeated her request, Grant called an ambulance.
Judge Becroft said the victim and her family had been profoundly affected and the girl still suffered from her injuries, which included a broken nose, concussion, cuts, swelling and extreme bruising. She had some physical scarring as well as psychological effects which were taking some effort to get over.
She had spent a night in hospital and another since for an operation on her nose, which still leaked what was thought to be brain fluid. She slept in her mother's bed for five months after the attack, had developed depression, still had pain, and was still jumpy in public and around young men.
In a sense, she had been robbed of her teenage years, Judge Becroft told Grant.
"You say that after reading [her victim impact statement] you 'feel like shit', and so you should.
"No other reaction ought to be humanely possible," the judge said.
None of Grant's previous behaviour, which included several assaults, drug use and some cruelty to animals, could have predicted such an episode.
At this stage, it was hard to know what was wrong with Grant, the judge said.
It was clear he had had a difficult upbringing - a volatile parental relationship, binge-drinking within the family, his parents splitting when he was 7 - but in some senses it was not as bad as that of many other young people who appeared in youth court.
There seemed to be two sides to his personality, "the pleasant charming William" and "the violent William".
While the violence was at the more serious end of the most serious category of non-homicide assault, the judge believed Crown solicitor Marie Grills' suggested starting point of up to 10 years' jail was too high and Grant's lawyer Bernadette Farnan's suggestion of a starting point of five to six years too low.
Considering the extreme violence, attacks to the head and use of a weapon, the judge decided a starting point of eight years in prison was appropriate.
The sentence was reduced by three and a-half years for Grant's youth and his early admission to the charge.
