Gloriavale leader Howard Temple appeals ‘excessive’ jail sentence
The lawyer for convicted sex offender and former Gloriavale leader Howard Temple claims jailing the 85-year-old was excessive.
Temple was sentenced to 26 months’ jail in December for indecencies on multiple girls and young women.
He immediately appealed and has been on bail.
His lawyer, Michael Vesty, argues the sentence is excessive given Temple’s age, bail conditions and cognitive impairment.
Vesty said it should be reduced to two years or less to allow for home detention.
He argued the sentencing judge, Judge Neave, failed to take into account Temple’s circumstances, and had not “delved deeply enough” when assessing his remorse and insight.
Judge Neave’s criticism of Temple’s ability to learn, or “reprogramme” as the judge called it, was not given any context, “because we’ve got an 85-year-old man with a mild cognitive impairment who’s lived in an isolated community for 50 years.
“His Honour ought not to have expected a linear reprogramming, to borrow his word,” Vesty said.
Temple’s memory difficulties meant he may not remember all the offending, hindering his ability to show insight and remorse, he said.
Temple also suffered from the same power imbalance as others in the community, as he lacked “the advantages of learnings in the outside world,” Vesty said.
“He’s been removed from his community. He’s been removed from all his social supports, all of the structure he’s known for 50 years, and excluded from the property, admittedly tantalisingly close, but it might as well have been in Greymouth … given he just didn’t have the ability to be back in the community.”
Temple’s bail conditions were that he reside with his family at Glen Hopeful adjacent to the main settlement at Haupiri, not go to the Gloriavale Christian community, not associate with the complainants, not be in the unsupervised company of women under the age of 18, and be subject to an Oranga Tamariki Safety Plan.
Exceptions allowed Temple to attend 30th anniversary celebrations and a funeral at Gloriavale, alongside a bail variation that allowed him to attend services at the smaller Lake Brunner compound twice weekly between 9.30am and 1.30pm, as long as he was in the company of one of four people.
Temple lived with his wife, daughter and several generations of his family at Glen Hopeful.
The Crown said the offending spanned many years, despite a previous police warning, and affected a large number of victims.
Crown lawyer Aaron Harvey said Temple’s bail was relatively unrestricted, save for the condition excluding him from the crime scene.
“This isn’t a situation where we have restrictive bail terms in terms of a curfew or electronic monitoring – what we have is a condition preventing someone from entering a community where it’s alleged their offending has occurred over a period of time.”
Harvey said there was no grounds for a greater sentence discount for remorse or insight, noting Temple had gone all the way to trial, and highlighting Judge Neave’s sentencing comment that Temple had only a “dawning insight” into his offending.
He said police warned Temple about inappropriate touching in 2018, yet he continued to offend.
A non-custodial sentence would inadequately reflect the scale of the offences, the length of time over which they occurred, the number of victims involved, and the fact the offender was a leader of the community, Harvey said.
There was also an element of brazenness to the offending – which frequently happened in broad daylight or while surrounded by hundreds of community members – that had to be taken into account.
Justice Paulsen reserved his decision.
Temple, who was arrested in 2023, denied the offending up until the third day of his 2025 trial, when he plead guilty to amended charges.
He admitted five counts of indecent assault, five of doing an indecent act and two of common assault.
Many of the charges were representative, meaning they related to numerous instances of similar offending.
The offending against six girls and young women occurred between 2002 and 2022, while Temple held powerful roles at Gloriavale.
He stood down in August, weeks after his guilty plea
Following Temple’s conviction, former community members urged the government to “wake up” about the dangers they saw at Gloriavale.
Just months before his trial began, Temple made a public apology to victims of historic sexual abuse at the community which some former members rejected as insincere.
Temple was personally anointed by the group’s founder Hopeful Christian to take up the mantle of Overseeing Shepherd after his death in 2018.
The Australian evangelist began the group in 1969 as the Springbank Christian Community near Rangiora.
Christian was sentenced to five years in prison in 1995 on three charges of indecent assault.
He was sentenced to six years on 10 counts of indecent assault against five young complainants in the 1980s, but won an appeal against his conviction and sentence.
After a retrial, Christian was convicted on three charges, and spent 11 months in jail before being paroled.
About 600 people are believed to live at Gloriavale’s compound at Lake Haupuri, about 60 kilometres from Greymouth.