Former Otago Boys’ High School maths teacher David Bond, 73, was found guilty of indecent assault following a judge-alone trial at the Dunedin District Court last month.
Yesterday afternoon, Judge David Robinson sentenced the defendant to three months’ home detention and 150 hours’ community work.
Sentencing was complicated by the fact Bond had previously been jailed for 25 months in 2022 for sex crimes against boys during his tenure at the school.
The judge said he had to consider yesterday’s punishment through the legal lens of "totality" — as though the new conviction was being sentenced with the slew of previous offences.
The court heard Bond’s victim had suffered "deep and long-lasting" effects following the incident he endured on school camp at Mt Aspiring in 2008.
"He feels cheated out of his education and wonders what he could have been," Judge Robinson said.
"He’s to be commended for his courage to come forward."
The man, who was a teen at the time of the crime, said his mental health had been adversely affected by the groping, as well as his ability to trust others and his general sense of safety.
At trial he described being asleep in a bunk room when he heard Bond enter in the middle of the night and remove another pupil who had been sleeping on the floor.
He woke about an hour later to the teacher placing a hand on his buttocks and the other down the front of his pyjamas.
The victim recalled Bond’s distinctive voice telling him he was "just checking on you, making sure you were OK".
"I was so uncomfortable, I didn’t know what to do," the victim said.
"I didn’t know how to react, so I did nothing."
The court yesterday heard Bond maintained his innocence, despite his lengthy history of similar sex crimes.
The defendant at trial told the court he had been on 38 camps and had never been in the dorms after lights-out.
"If someone was in the bunk room, standing over you, it would be a very creepy thing to happen and I would never have contemplated doing something like that," he said.
But his previous convictions were aired in court and counted heavily against his credibility.
There were four incidents between 1975 and 2011 when Bond had committed "strikingly similar" indecent assaults on pupils.
They included several episodes during which the ex-teacher had molested children in their bunks.
Bond’s denials were "self-serving", the judge ruled.
Allegations during the trial that the teacher had indecently touched students during rock-climbing, exposed himself and instructed children to defecate on a makeshift barbecue were not the subject of charges and were set aside by Judge Robinson.
Bond has previously served two terms of home detention on similar sex charges before 2022’s prison sentence.
Yesterday’s sentencing marked his 26th such conviction, the judge said.
Bond was granted parole in January last year and the board heard he had told a psychologist he was "unsure regarding the exact number and names of all his victims".
A Probation report assessed Bond as a low risk of future offending.
rob.kidd@odt.co.nz , Court reporter
