A violent rapist will be monitored indefinitely after the Department of Corrections successfully applied for a public protection order against him.
Mark Chisnall has been in prison for 11 years. Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
Mark Chisnall, 31, has been in prison for 11 years.
Despite a release date of April this year, he has been held at a self-care unit on the perimeter of Christchurch Men's Prison after Corrections won an interim order that prevented him from being released.
Corrections applied to the High Court for either a public protection order or an extended supervision order, with intensive monitoring.
He was convicted of raping and sexually abusing two children.
He also violently raped a women after grabbing her from behind as she ran past him.
In granting the public protection order, the court ruled that Chisnall posed a very high risk of imminent serious sexual offending if he were released and left unsupervised.
In 2001, when he was about 14, he raped an 8-year-old girl in a park in a small Taranaki town - an offence he was not convicted of until July 2009.
A few days after that rape, he forced a 7-year-old boy to perform a sex act on him, and was later jailed.
But while on bail, he was convicted and discharged for assaulting a 20-year-old woman. Chisnall told the woman to "come with me", but when she refused he hit her over the head with a stick. He denied the attack.
In 2004, he admitted to his caregivers he had been peeping at a woman in a hotel room.
A year later, when he was 18, he had been waiting by a park to be picked up for work when he grabbed a woman who was running past him.
Chisnall used physical force to silence her and made her perform a sexual act before he raped her.
She was left injured and traumatised, but Chisnall had said at the time the violence involved had stimulated him.
Whie in prison, he has completed specialist sex offender treatment, but psychologists treating him said he retained little of the material learnt.
The judge noted that Chisnall used deviant sexual fantasies to cope with stressful situations, and they had played a key role in his offending history.
