Former Parole Board chairman Sir Ronald Young talks murders, regrets and honesty

Sir Ronald Young is a former chief judge of the district court, Justice of the High Court and was the chairman of the Parole Board for seven years. He's been the gatekeeper who decides whether some of the country's most notorious offenders can be released from prison early, albeit to spend the rest of their lives under strict supervision. Sir Ron speaks to Jeremy Wilkinson about sitting face to face with murderers, the strategies the board uses to test offenders, and the things that play on his conscience.

Sir Ron Young has probably spoken to more murderers face to face than anyone else in New Zealand.

"I've talked to far more murderers in the seven years that I've been on the board than I ever sentenced in the High Court," he tells NZME.

"And I've talked to them in a personal way. When you sentence someone, it's not a personal event; the judge sits a long way away from the defendant and you're talking not just to him or her, but also to the community, the prosecution and defence lawyers and the families and the victims.

"In parole, you're sitting at the same level as the offender, maybe 10-15ft from them, and talking to them in a very personal way. In that sense, it's a much more personal engagement than you ever get in the courts."

It's part of the reason he considers his time at the helm of the New Zealand Parole Board as being harder than the eight years he spent as Chief District Court Judge, or even the 15 years he served as a justice of the High Court.

In those roles, he saw a fraction of the violent offenders he had seen in his seven-year tenure on the board, and in some ways is the exact opposite of what he was doing as a judge.

In his former roles, he was sending offenders to prison, whereas for the better part of the past decade, he has been in charge of deciding whether they can be released.

As Sir Ron describes it, it's "an impossible job".

"I guess at the core what you're trying to do is assess human conduct and predict it, and that's notoriously difficult," he says.

"People will do crazy stuff and unpredictable stuff all the time.

"You're thinking, 'if I make a mistake there could be catastrophic consequences' … but you can't let that mean your decision is always no."

While he describes offenders as unpredictable, there is a pattern for who ends up behind bars for murder and, for the most part, it's because of "assaults gone wrong".

"The vast majority of murders are spontaneous. A disturbingly large number of men are killing their partners. Very, very few are planned," he says.

"It's mostly a spontaneous assault."

Sir Ron believes the public probably has a misunderstanding of the typical murder and the typical murderer, and that a lot of the people who commit homicide are unlikely to offend again.

But, then there are a few who are deeply worrying, with long histories of documented violence, who the board is extremely wary about letting back into the community.

The ugly truth

Backing up Sir Ron during his time on the board were 21 panel conveners, all former judges, King's Counsels or barristers, three psychiatrists and 23 community, or lay, members with backgrounds ranging from accountants to former journalists, plus career public servants.

Between them they held more than 8000 parole hearings in the past year.

"It's stressful, and it's really difficult," Sir Ron says of the role, noting that members are required to read thousands of pages of case notes, court documents and reports every week.

"Personally, I do think you need emotional stability and maturity because you'll be reading a great deal of material that's pretty horrendous."

It's simply not possible to read it all in detail, so the panel members get well versed in triaging as they go about what's most important.

There is a structured decision-making process the board goes through when determining if a prisoner is eligible for early release, and the mantra of the board is "undue risk".

In a nutshell, this boils down to one key concern: what is the likelihood that a person will go on to commit another crime if released from prison?

It's predicting that risk, and weighing it against the safety of the community, the board is trying to determine when an offender sits before it.

It has a range of strategies to get the information it needs.

One of those is attempting to rattle the offender, and Sir Ron says the board will try to push a person into a situation where they're being honest about the crime that put them behind bars.

"Because until we're satisfied about that, any form of rehabilitation is meaningless," he says.

"So, sometimes we are trying to disorientate them a bit and to put them off guard. We're trying in the end to get them to be honest with themselves and with us. We don't want tick boxes."

"We want to go much deeper than that. Putting people off their guard can be an effective way of achieving that."

Offenders will almost always be asked to take the board through their crime, with the ultimate goal being to find out the factors that triggered their offending.

This can sometimes take years and multiple hearings to tease out the full picture.

In 2025, Ashley Peach revealed for the first time in 16 years why he lured a woman into his home and strangled her to death. He had appeared before the board three times over the years, but never revealed that he wanted to hurt Kerry Downey only so he could be sent to prison to confront a man who had allegedly wronged him.

While Peach pleaded guilty to murder, it was never entirely clear, until his hearing in November, why he had killed Downey, because he had never explained his actions.

Part of the reason for repetitive questioning is to get offenders to go away and start thinking about why they committed a crime, Sir Ron says.

"To work it through in their own mind and to try - and this is the hardest thing for many of them - to be honest with themselves about it because it requires a look at yourself that is pretty unnattractive and often very ugly about what you were doing and why you were doing it."

"It's a way of getting them to self-reflect."

In denial

While there is a structure to the way the board operates in terms of its decision-making, there are a few offenders who throw a spanner into its workings.

And those are primarily people who maintain they're innocent.

Sir Ron calls them "deniers".

"There will be a small number of people who will actually be innocent, but we can't investigate that, it's not our job," he says.

"And so we have to proceed on the basis they've committed the crime.

"The deniers, in my mind, are one of the most difficult categories of all offenders to deal with because the first part of the process is to get everyone to understand why they committed the crime. With a denier, you can't even get past first base. That means it's really difficult to confidently release people who are deniers."

This is because they haven't done rehabilitation nor any reintegration work, and they can't be tested because they haven't done either of those things. Instead, the board has to be convinced they've committed a one-off crime and there's no chance of them repeating it.

"And that is hard to be certain about," Sir Ron says.

Perhaps the most famous case of denial in recent years was that of Mark Lundy, who spent more than 23 years behind bars for the murder of his wife, Christine, and his 7-year-old daughter, Amber, who were found hacked to death in their Palmerston North home 25 years ago.

The now-66-year-old has always maintained someone else killed his family and took his fight against the conviction all the way to the Privy Council, which quashed the guilty verdict in 2013, only for him to be found guilty again in 2015 on retrial and sent back to prison.

In 2022, his minimum period of non-parole expired, meaning Lundy became eligible for early release from prison; however, because he maintained his innocence, he butted heads with Parole Board members who questioned how they were meant to assess a safety plan for release from prison if his argument was that he wasn't a risk in the first place.

At one of his hearings his lawyer, Ella Burton, addressed the "elephant in the room": his professed innocence.

"He should not be detained because of a lack of admission," she said.

At his third appearance before the Parole Board earlier in 2025, Lundy managed to convince the board he was no longer an undue risk to the community and was released in May.

For Sir Ron, the other hardest cases to sit on are those for offenders who have finite sentences and are going to be released at some point, regardless of whether they've been properly rehabilitated.

These offenders are still eligible for parole, even if they're not seeking it on the day of their hearing.

"They are really scary," he says.

"You just hold your breath, thinking they'll be back in the Herald within a relatively short period of time."

The board can make a call to release such offenders early so it can still have some oversight for a limited time outside the wire. This is sometimes preferable to the supervision that's in place for six months for offenders post release because Sir Ron says many former inmates simply don't co-operate because they feel they've done their time.

In 2024, Nicho Waipuka appeared before the board months before he was due to be released for serving his full 13-year sentence for beating journalist Phil Cottrell to death.

Waipuka was defiant before the board, refusing to answer questions or giving only short answers. Ultimately, the board found he was still classified as high risk and declined his early release, but he was out of prison within months anyway.

A personal toll

Having spent 15 years as a High Court justice, Sir Ron has sent hundreds of people to prison.

From time to time, murderers he has put away for life will find themselves sitting again before the man who put them behind bars.

But, their reaction isn't what you'd expect.

"It's amazing, so often when I've done that I've had the offender say. 'It's good to see you again Justice Young, it's been a long time'."

"Although I can be tough at times and not tough at other times, I think if you show people that you respect them - even if you don't like what they've done - it's so much easier to communicate with them."

He has had letters and emails from offenders in prison who he's dealt with, and he says for the most part they have all been kind words.

"Even from people who I've probably given a bit of a hard time. And some of them say that's what they needed, something to wake them up.

"It's fine as long as you're respectful, you can be as tough as you think is justified, but you have got to tell them why and what's wrong, and what they need to do.

"The sad ones are really those you may originally have sentenced to prison for something not super-serious who are coming back and getting worse and worse."

The board has a rule that any member should recuse themselves from the panel if they've had dealings with an offender that involved a prediction about their future risk.

In Sir Ron's case, this means he doesn't sit on cases for offenders he has sentenced to preventive detention during his time as a judge, because the sentence itself is a statement that the offender will always be a risk of some kind.

In 2024, the High Court found there had been a "perception of bias" when a psychologist who found mass murderer Raymond Ratima was not insane when he killed seven of his family members sat on a panel to decide if he could be released from prison early.

Ratima was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders with a minimum non-parole period of 10 years in 1993. He has served 32 years for his crimes and has been denied parole 16 times. After his 14th unsuccessful attempt, Ratima lodged a bid with the High Court claiming the Parole Board was biased in refusing his release.

The court ordered a rehearing of his October 2022 appearance before the board that didn't include the same psychologist.

'It plays on your conscience for sure'

There are, of course, rare instances when an offender is released and goes on to commit another violent crime.

One of the most chilling examples in New Zealand's history is that of Paul Wilson, who was jailed for 24 years following the 1994 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Kimberly Schroder, only to be released on parole and go on to murder Nicole Tuxford in similar circumstances in 2019.

A spokesperson for the Schroder family told NZME after Tuxford's murder that the Parole Board had "blood on its hands" for the decision to release Wilson.

After the second murder, an independent review into whether the board had made the right decision in 2011 to release him from prison on life parole found proper process was followed.

Sir Ron says there are some offenders that he regrets granting parole to, and those are almost always the ones who go on to commit a violent crime after being released.

"That is the most terrible situation … It's hugely upsetting."

"You search your conscience. We all want to get it right all the time and we all know we're doing an impossible job in a sense because we're trying to predict human behaviour 100% of the time.

"It plays on your conscience for sure."

When it does happen, the Parole Board goes through a process that analyses whether the board did the best job it could in the circumstances, the mistakes that were made and what could have been done differently.

According to a Department of Corrections OIA, the Parole Board has released 27,933 people since it was formed in 2002.

Before the New Zealand Parole Board was formed, there were several District Parole Boards sitting alongside a national board.

Since 2000, there have been 100 people who have been released on parole and convicted of a total of 105 offences of murder within 10 years of their release.

According to the data, 57 out of those 100 people were imprisoned on a lead offence of violence before being released on parole. The next most common offence was burglary with 16 offenders, sexual offending with eight, and dishonesty offending with four.

Sir Ron concedes there aren't many positive headlines when it comes to the Parole Board and most people who take on the job know it is primarily getting negative feedback or complaints.

Aside from finding the role "incredibly interesting", Sir Ron was taken with it because of the human contact, and the ability to make a difference.

"You kind of feel as though this is one part of the justice system where you can have a real effect."

Sir Ron retired from the board earlier in 2025 and was replaced by retired High Court Justice Jan-Marie Doogue.

These days, he still sits on the Court of Appeal for Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Pitcairn Islands, and is weighing up writing a textbook on parole as a kind of "how to" for lawyers and offenders alike.

- This story was originally published by the New Zealand Herald.