Serious Drama as Woman on Trial Flees From Dock Before Judge Delivers Jail Sentence in Court (Photo)

 

 

Nikita Chela McCausland, a 29-year-old woman who fled the dock as a judge handed her a 25-month jail sentence got a brief taste of freedom before being recaptured by security staff.

 

According to Stuff National, the mother of a three-year-old, handed her keys to a woman supporter standing just behind the dock in the Christchurch District Court, as though she was accepting the jail term Judge Gary MacAskill was imposing.

 

But seconds later, she bolted out through the door of the ground-floor courtroom and into the corridor.

 

Then, inexplicably she turned left into the court foyer instead of going out through the main doors.

 

At the secure staff doorway she had a stroke of luck, ghosting through the door as a staffer was using it and getting into the courtyard area between the court house buildings and the Avon River.

 

A court security officer – the same one who waded into an assault on a witness in the High Court recently – captured her there and she was frog-marched back by officers and police.

 

"I was lucky she tripped," said the security officer, who was sporting a least one scrape on her bare arm.

 

McCausland was then put into the more secure dock for people in custody so that Judge MacAskill could complete the sentencing.

 

Defence counsel Sunny Teki-Clark said she wanted to say a few words to the court, presumably an apology, but the judge ruled it out.

 

"I don't think that's proper. She is likely to be facing a charge," he explained.

 

McCausland has a long history of offending and was facing sentencing for perverting the course of justice for getting another woman to do her community work, as well as receiving two stolen laptops, possession of firearm ammunition, possession of a pipe for smoking methamphetamine, and dangerous driving.

 

Teki-Clark said McCausland was turning her life around. She was distancing herself from family members and associates who had led her into a criminal lifestyle. She was training in beauty therapy and wanted to open a nail salon. He urged that home detention be granted.

 

Crown prosecutor Chris Bernhardt said she showed an "entrenched disregard for court orders" and numerous community-based sentences had failed to curb her offending.

 

Judge MacAskill said she had been sentenced to 100 hours of community work for two charges of driving while suspended. She then got another woman to sign in as her and do two days of the sentence and had delivered the woman to the work centre herself.

 

He was explaining the sentence was beyond the two-year range for home detention, and he would not have granted it anyway, when McCausland bolted from the courtroom.