A man who spent 22 years in prison after he was wrongly convicted of murder has been jailed for sexual connection with a 15-year-old girl.
Kelvin John Williams was jailed for two years and four months in the High Court at Christchurch on Monday by Justice Rachel Dunningham.
The 53-year-old was convicted of murder in 1996 and jailed for life after a street fight with Clinton Strong in the early hours of New Year's Day in 1995.
In 2017, the Court of Appeal ruled Williams suffered a miscarriage of justice, and decided he should have been convicted of manslaughter with an eight-year jail term.
It ruled that given Williams had served 22 years in jail, and evidence had been lost, a retrial was neither feasible or necessary. It released him from custody without conditions.
Williams earlier pleaded guilty in the District Court to two charges of sexual contact with a child aged between 12-16 and a charge of male assaults female.
The case was transferred to the High Court to hear an application for preventive detention.
At his sentencing on Monday, Justice Dunningham referred to the summary of facts in relation to his recent offending.
The summary said Williams and the victim, who resided in a residential home contracted by Oranga Tamariki, were not previously known to each other.
About 3am on May 28, 2024, Williams and the victim added each other on Snapchat and began exchanging messages.
The pair discussed meeting in person, and it was arranged for Williams to pick her up and take her back to his property.
In the messages, the victim told Williams she had just gone through the youth justice system and asked how old he was.
Williams said he was 45, but not an "old man". Later in the conversation, she said she was in an Oranga Tamariki home.
The messages also contained references to them arranging to consume drugs together, including cannabis and because Williams was out of cannabis, methamphetamine.
Williams indicated in several messages his intentions to have sexual connection with the victim which she was open to.
The victim told Williams she was 15, to which he replied: "Shit that's pretty young lady" and "I feel like a dirty old man lol". They continued to exchange sexually explicit messages.
Williams acknowledged that he may get into trouble with the "law" if he touched her "boobs".
At about 8.30am, Williams picked the victim up from her address in his car and drove back to his home in New Brighton.
During a conversation, the victim again told Williams she was 15.
Once at the property, Williams took her to his bedroom. He smoked some methamphetamine and offered it to the victim who declined. Williams repeatedly fell asleep as a result of the drugs throughout the sexual encounter.
Williams began touching the victim's thighs and kissing her breasts. She told him "no, I just came here to hang".
Further sexual conduct followed.
At some stage Williams punched the victim in her side in response to her accidentally touching some wounds on his shin.
At about 1.30pm, the victim asked Williams if she could leave to go to the shop. She then told a family member what happened and reported it to police.
Williams initially admitted to the circumstances, but denied any sexual connection taking place.
His DNA was found within a sample of semen on the victim's clothes.
Crown prosecutor Will Taffs told the court the offending had a "real element of predatory behaviour".
Taffs said there had been some suggestion the meeting was not for sexual purposes, which he said was not consistent with messages between the pair.
Taffs said the Crown sought preventive detention and said Williams posed a "serious harm" to the community.
Williams' lawyer, Tony Bamford, opposed the application for preventive detention.
In relation to the offending in 1995, Bamford said Williams was walking home in the early hours of New Year's Day, got into a verbal confrontation over a cigarette, there was a threat "and he responded".
Bamford said Williams was "let down a number of ways by the system".
Bamford said the sexual offending was a "one-off," with no such previous history.
Justice Dunningham said there was a "clear pattern of violent offending", referencing convictions for injuring with intent to injure, assault with intent to injure and threatening to kill.
Williams was found to have a "deep-seated sense of grievance" against the justice system, and a lack of insight into his offending.
She said that with a "degree of structure in your life", there was a prospect Williams could avoid serious offending in the future and rejected a sentence of preventive detention.
