previous history<\/a> of harassing the same neighbours \u2013 including four breaches of a protection order in 2021 \u2013 and other people, dating back to a charge of threatening behaviour in 2015.<\/p>\nCourt documents from 2021 say she made \u201cfalse and damaging\u201d accusations of sexual misconduct about one of her neighbours, to the authorities and on social media.<\/p>\n
She also once threw a rock at an AA serviceman who had been called out to fix a neighbour\u2019s car, then drove towards him, stopping about 60cm away.<\/p>\n
Judge Collins stopped short of imposing a custodial sentence on O\u2019Neill, saying she had \u201ccomplex needs\u201d and her claims about the neighbouring family were \u201cdelusional\u201d.<\/p>\n
Instead, he imposed a maximum term of two years of intensive supervision by a probation officer.<\/p>\n
The supervision includes conditions that O\u2019Neill lives at the Dunedin address and does not go near her former house or neighbour\u2019s house on Napier Hill.<\/p>\n
She will also need to do any counselling thought necessary.<\/p>\n
She is not allowed to contact her victims or post anything about them on social media.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill was ordered to pay $500 in reparation to her victims.<\/p>\n
Judge Collins warned O\u2019Neill that if she breached her intensive supervision, or reoffended, \u201cI doubt that you would avoid a term of imprisonment\u201d, or at least an electronically monitored sentence such as home detention.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill stood unsuccessfully as a candidate in the Hawke\u2019s Bay Regional Council elections in 2019 under the name Jelena Jordan.<\/p>\n
She was previously an Alliance Party candidate for Parliament in 2011 and 2014.<\/p>\n
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME\u2019s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke\u2019s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of frontline experience as a probation officer.<\/p>\n
Join the NZ Herald\u2019s Open Justice team for Case by Case<\/a>, a video and podcast series examining the disputes and decisions making headlines across New Zealand. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"However, Judge Russell Collins said the heart of the matter was not the physical damage caused but a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":575070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13738,19956,2082,2740,75013,7052,3607,3244,111,43,139,69,1118,283349,5161],"class_list":["post-575069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-alliance","tag-candidate","tag-for","tag-former","tag-harassment","tag-mary","tag-napier","tag-neighbours","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-oneill","tag-sentenced"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/575070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}