Sensible Sentencing Trust

Coskery was the mother of Auckland pizza delivery driver Michael Choy, who was assaulted and murdered by several youths including Bailey Junior Kurariki.

[2] In early 2002, the Trust established an online offender database in response to the New Zealand Government's refusal to undertake this task, in spite of repeated requests to do so.

[20] In December 2018, the Privacy Commissioner John Edwards chastised the Trust for wrongfully misidentifying a man as a pedophile on its online database for almost two years.

"[21][22][23] In response to criticism by the Privacy Commissioner, McVicar admitted that the organisation "absolutely cocked up and deserved to be publicly identified."

However, he criticised Edwards for making an issue of identifying the Trust while not calling for the names of recidivist violent offenders to be placed in a publicly accessible database.

[2] In January 2021, former New Zealand First Member of Parliament Darroch Ball became the co-leader of the Sensible Sentencing Trust alongside Jess McVicar.

In a press release, the Trust described the proposed law as "weak and watered-down" and took issue with the Government to wipe 13,000 former strike warnings and its higher threshold for crimes that would fall under the three-strikes legislation.

[4][25] On 23 October 2024, Radio New Zealand reported that 450 of the 763 select committee submissions of the three-strikes legislation were based on a template provided by the Sensible Sentencing Trust.

Following public consultation at the select committee stage, the New Zealand Cabinet agreed to lower the threshold for first strike offenses from 24 months to 12 months and to activate three strikes warnings issued under the previous Sentencing and Parole Reform Act 2010 legislation where offenders met the new thresholds under the new legislation.