A passenger in a car during an illegal street race that ended in a fatal ccrash has been given home detention for trying to pervert the course of justice.
File photo Photo: gunnar3000/123RF
Stephen Jones, 21, was sentenced in the High Court in Hamilton to four-and-half months' jail, alongside another sentence of three-and-a-half months for failing to stop to ascertain injuries.
Justice Hinton commuted the prison time to home detention.
The crash, in which four people were killed, happened on State Highway 3 near Hamilton Airport on 24 June, 2016.
Jones was convicted at a trial in February 2018, for editing down a 38-second video that showed both cars racing near Hamilton Airport and the crash itself.
The version he provided to police was just 13 seconds long.
A forensic examination found that he had edited the video more than once, with the final edit happening just two hours before a scheduled meeting with police.
Justice Hinton said no one will know what the video showed because Jones destroyed it.
She accepted he was remorseful but did not accept his view that the video was his to do with what he liked.
"You knew the video captured a fatal car crash along with the critical moments leading up to it and you knew the police were investigating and were entitled to see it," she told him.
"You did not need to know the precise reach of the law to know that would have been true as a matter of simple common sense," she said.
Justice Hinton told Jones that it needed little imagination about how the family of the victims felt about him leaving the scene and editing the video.
The driver of the car Jones was in, Dylan Cossey, 21, was sentenced on 20 April to one year of home detention and 400 hours of community work.
Cossey lost his licence for 10 years and Jones for a year.
