A 26-year-old solo-mother, Loleini ‘Ala, who pleaded guilty to stealing $14,375 pa’anga from her employer in a staged robbery, was discharged without conviction by the Tonga Supreme Court on Wednesday 7 November. The accused’s employer, a fish shop, was sympathetic and asked Police to withdraw the charges.

According to the ruling [2] by Hon. Justice Niu the accused had been working for the employer since 2015. She was a highly regarded employee and was entrusted with banking the finances of the company and paying the salaries of her fellow colleagues.

In early November 2017, the accused opened a bank account at  BSP and transferred $14,375 of the company’s money into it. Following the transfer, the accused called police and told them that she had been robbed in a car that she was using in the parking lot of the Catholic Basilica in the Nuku’alofa CBD. To make the robbery look real, she cut her hands and scattered money into the car.

Despite the seriousness of the offence, Justice Niu decided that the accused should be discharged without conviction. He noted that the accused did not have a criminal record, that she was taking care of her widowed mother, and that her actions were out of character.

Justice Niu said that the accused may have committed the crime out of revenge because she had not received a promised raise from her employer. He added that imprisonment would deprive the accused of her child and that fines were unaffordable, and that a conviction would bar her from employment.

In his ruling,  Justice Niu stated, “Whist I do not for one moment condone or overlook what the accused has done, that she has knowingly and embezzled her employer's money, I understand why she did it and I believe that she would not have done what she did, if she had been fairly dealt with by her employer. I am not saying that her employer unfairly dealt with her because I have not heard the employer's side; in fact the employer says in his letter that the accused did wrong to the company. But the accused believed, she had been unfairly and wrongly dealt with by the company, and she did what she did because of that.”

Justice Niu went further to state that he did not want to sentence young people to prison where they would be hardened. “She was most foolish to have done what she did. But so do young people and if all young people are sentenced to imprisonment for being foolish they would all grow up with prison sentence hanging over them. At the same time, they would be hardened, rather than taught, by such sentences, especially with the stigma with which such sentences entail, such that they have the tendency to re-offend. Because they are young and foolish, they see themselves as having been condemned and imprisoned as criminals, and that that is all they can be, and many, if not most, of them re-offend because that is what they have been condemned to be. That cannot have been the intention of the Legislature in enacting the imprisonment sentences in the Criminal Offences Act.”

She was discharged on a condition that she shall not commit any offence within two years, and that the balance of the funds in her bank account be returned to the complainant company.