The victim’s elderly mother, who was in a wheelchair, had watched the attack.
Tanirau Whaanga’s lawyer, Chris Nicholls, had said at sentencing that his client had attempted to get help for anger issues and was a walking time bomb just ready to go off.
At the time Tanirau Whaanga headbutted the victim he was still serving a sentence of intensive supervision for an earlier attack in which he had stomped on the neck of a man laid out unconscious by a relative. The prone man's neck bore the pattern from the sole of Tanirau Whaanga's shoe.
John Pratt, a professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminology at Victoria University, is undertaking research on the relationship between risk, populism and criminal justice.