Ex-Gloriavale leader Howard Temple won’t go to jail for touching girls, as sentence quashed

| The Press | Brett Kerr-Laurie |

Former Gloriavale leader Howard Temple’s more than two-year prison sentence for inappropriately touching girls in his religious community over two decades has been quashed.

Instead, he will serve 11 months home detention – and his name will be removed from the child sex offenders’ register.

Temple last year pleaded guilty to 12 amended charges related to inappropriately touching and rubbing girls and young women at Gloriavale between 2002 and 2022.

However, he immediately appealed a two-year, two-month prison sentence delivered on December 12 – and has been on bail ever since.

Through his lawyer, Temple, 85, argued part of the sentence was “more than stern”, and his remorse, age, health and “onerous” bail conditions were under-appreciated.

Court of Appeal’s Justice Owen Paulsen, in a decision just out, quashed the 26-month jail term. He instead sentenced him to 11 months of home detention.

Temple has been living outside the community while on bail, though close to it.

In Temple’s sentencing in December, the District Court heard he repeatedly indecently touched girls and young women’s bottoms and legs.

He told them he loved them and called one of them his “favourite girlfriend”.

Temple, at one point a principal of an early childhood centre in the community, also admitted touching a young woman’s breast, kissing another’s neck and rubbing a girl’s body.

He was an American mechanical engineer formerly called Howard Smitherman before joining Gloriavale in the 1970s.

Hopeful Christian, who founded the community in 1969, was found guilty of indecent assault in the 1990s – the grim details of which were only made public a couple of years ago – and spent just under two years behind bars.

Christian chose Temple as his successor before his death in 2018.