Peter McNamara's victim says he has not changed from being "an arrogant, disrespectful, conniving, deceitful rapist of the most selfish and vain nature".© 2009 Fairfax New Zealand Limited
In an emotive submission to the board hearing last month to decide if McNamara should be freed, his victim pleaded for him to stay behind bars. Now she has been told he will be freed on January 22.
Earlier this year, the board made an embarrassing U-turn after agreeing to free McNamara on home detention. It reversed the decision on realising it failed to tell the victim, who successfully appealed against the decision.
She was then given the chance to oppose his being freed on parole and was determined that this time her voice would be heard. She now wonders why she bothered.
"Unfortunately in the last 18 years Peter McNamara has not changed from being an arrogant, disrespectful, conniving, deceitful rapist of the most selfish and vain nature," she told the board hearing.
The rapists' families had verbally abused and sniggered at the victim when she read her victim impact report at their sentencing, she said.
Then she learned that two of McNamara's friends, Rene Mangnus and Paul Turney, lied in a botched bid to jack up an appeal to free him.
She then had to give evidence at their trial three months ago. They were found guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice and were last month given 12-month jail terms.
The victim told the board Mangnus and Turney apologised to her face for the harm they had done when they were sentenced to one-year jail terms last month. "Turney's family approached me in the street, grief stricken and apologising with tears streaming down their faces."
McNamara, in stark contrast, has never expressed remorse but she believed it was worthwhile making submissions to protest against him being paroled.
The victim accepted McNamara had a low chance of reoffending or harming the community.
But she pleaded for the board to "consider the harm that will be done to me, to New Zealand's justice system and the message it will send to women considering coming forward to report rape" should they parole him so soon into his sentence.
As to her own suffering, she told the board she suffered from post- traumatic stress disorder.
"PTSD may just sound like fancy words to you but my daily reality is an anxiety disorder. The physical symptoms are awful, worse than awful, and leave me with persistent frightening thoughts and memories of my ordeal.
"It is appallingly lonely because few people truly understand my private prison - but unlike McNamara, I'm not entitled to parole from my prison, even after serving a life sentence of sadness, despair and dysfunction."
The woman told the Parole Board of her world being turned upside down after the gang rape and how she lost faith in ever being happy again.
Two days ago the board told her McNamara would be home with his family on January 22 because he was not deemed a risk to the community.
The board said it understood McNamara had "laid waste to her life" but agreed with McNamara's lawyer that her objections were outweighed by the board's primary role - to decide on the risk to the community.
The board saw no merit in home detention or residential restrictions and said McNamara continued to deny he raped the victim. The victim told The Dominion Post yesterday that all her efforts now seemed a waste of time.
"Today I sit at home on leave because I can no longer work, unfunded because ACC have a long, painful process in which victims who have sensitive claims are revictimised by the bureaucratic hypocrisy they are subjected to.
"For some reason those of us who have mental injuries caused by rapists like McNamara are different to someone who has fallen off a horse and broken a bone," she said.
She said she was told by ACC to go begging to Work and Income for a food voucher "to feed my kids" while she expected McNamara's family would have a "wonderful Christmas, looking forward to his release, while I beg friends to pay for my kids' Christmas presents."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/177806
