Paedophile gymnastics coach appeals sentence

A gymnastics coach once described by a young girl he abused as a "grandfather figure" is attempting to have his 15-year prison sentence reduced.

Gregory Pask, 62, was sentenced earlier this year for 256 offences against victims between the ages of 5 and 11 years old over a period of nine years. Most were young athletes under 12 he taught in his capacity as a coach at the Blenheim Gymnastics Club for the last 25 years, many of whom he took away for competitions.

Police have been unable to identify all of Pask’s victims because many are young children in objectionable videos he made of himself abusing them. They found he had committed 46 offences against an unknown number of victims over an eight-year period.

Five victims were however able to be identified and his offending against them included 60 sexual violations, 84 indecent acts and on 109 occasions he made objectionable publications involving multiple sexualised videos and photographs of them.

Pask was set to remain behind bars for a minimum of 10 years on charges he had earlier admitted including 20 for unlawful sexual connection with a female under 12, a further 20 charges of performing an indecent act on a girl under 12, 17 charges of knowingly making an objectionable publication and three charges of knowingly possessing an objectionable publication.

Almost all were representative charges, meaning multiple offences of the same type occurred within a single charge.

He pleaded guilty to an initial set of charges last December, and in March this year, he confessed to more.

In April at the Blenheim District Court Judge Garry Barkle described the level of harm from Pask’s offending as "incalculable" and "utterly destructive" before sentencing him to 15 years and nine months behind bars, with a minimum non-parole period of 10 years.

But today at the Court of Appeal Pask challenged that sentence in the hope of seeing it reduced.

Pask’s lawyer, Marcus Zintl, said the sentencing judge had "double-counted" when it came to calculating his client’s sentence.

The starting point for Pask’s physical sexual violation and making objectionable publications was 17.5 years, while he received a further 3.5 years for possession of child exploitation material he’d downloaded from the internet.

A starting point is the total amount a convicted offender can be sentenced to, before discounts for pleading guilty or remorse are applied.

Zintl said the overall starting point for the two separate sets of charges should have been 17 to 18 years, rather than 21 altogether.

He also said that Pask should have been granted a 5% discount for remorse and that the sentencing judge hadn’t, in part, because he had refused to identify further victims, and this was a lack of co-operation rather than a lack of remorse.

Part of the lack of remorse discount was also that Pask didn’t pay any reparation to his victims, while Zintl said this was because he didn’t have the financial means to do so.

If Pask’s appeal is successful in full it would mean the overall starting point would be 17 to 18 years, with discounts for a guilty plea and remorse would mean he would serve 13 years in prison.

However, part of his appeal also challenges the imposition of a minimum non-parole period altogether, which means it would revert to an automatic one-third of his sentence. In that case, Pask would serve just over four years in prison for his offending.

Zintl argued that if a minimum non-parole period was imposed then it should be only half his sentence - or just over six years - rather than the two-thirds - or 10 years - that the sentencing judge imposed.

By contrast, Crown prosecutor Jackson Webber said Judge Gaskell had not imposed a manifestly excessive sentence and that it should stand as is.

He said that the 17.5-year starting point for the physical offending was warranted when considering the scale of the offending, the number of victims, the breach of trust and the degrading nature of some of the offending.

"He had won the trust of his community through gymnastics which was the very thing that enabled his offending," Webber told the court this afternoon.

"He won that trust and abused it for years in the grossest way.

"They were little girls and many of them were asleep."

Webber said the harm Pask had caused was "seismic" without even taking into account the fact he had filmed much of his abuse.

In regards to remorse, Webber said that Pask’s letters of apology to his victims were brief and similar in nature while in a pre-sentence report, he attempted to justify his behaviour by blaming it on the loss of his wife and daughter.

"It’s very difficult to draw a line between the loss of one’s wife and a need to sexually abuse pre-pubescent girls," he said.

"It’s all very absurd."

Court of Appeal judge Justice Christine Grice reserved her decision which will be issued in writing at a later date.

 - Jeremy Wilkinson, Open Justice reporter