Beyond the fact that all evidence points to serial rapist Malcolm Rewa, beyond the fact that the interrogation process bordered on Police State, beyond the fact that paid evidence was used to convict, beyond the fact that Pora couldn’t actually identify the house, beyond the fact that Rewa would NEVER take a member of an opposite gang along for a shared rape experience – beyond all that is the physical evidence that the amount of force and violence required to kill Susan Burdett was well beyond the capacity of a 17 year teenager.
The Police framed a young brown kid to take the fall and what we now see represents the worst miscarriage of justice ever in NZ history.
Our lust to punish whipped up be a crime headline news culture has led to a justice system incapable of objectively reflecting on its rulings. The desire to punish has outstripped our ability to be just. Add to this an alpha male Police Culture that believes it’s never wrong and we have private prisons full of innocent people.
The societal maturity to reflect upon this outcome and challenge it is something I hope to see in my lifetime.
Key’s response that our justice system is fine is the sort of blind privilege we should recoil from, not elect as Prime Minister.
And please, let’s not forget the terrible miscarriage of justice forced upon all the other women that Rewa went on to commit hideous crimes upon, that possibly would not have taken place had the police done their job properly in the first place. Teina Pora is but one of the many, many victims here as a result of this.
Yes it seems systemic as US are admitting now.
Read below.
The Police in the Alabama state case of the shooting of the black youth around Ferguson/Selma have now been covering up their apparent racially targeted practices of stopping an over reaching number of drivers of American African origin for minor offences and jailing them.
Watch Democracy Now for the story and see how the political pressure seems to force the blue thin line to over reach their role again.
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/5/headlines
The Justice Department is calling for a major overhaul of Ferguson’s criminal justice system after finding systemic discrimination against African-American residents. A comprehensive report says police disproportionately stopped, arrested and used force against blacks without reasonable suspicion, and then acted as a “collection agency” to operate off of their fines. Unveiling the probe’s findings, outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder described how residents were targeted for arrest and then saddled with penalties.
If all the evidence points to Rewa then why did the jury find Pora guilty? Any defence lawyer worth his salt would have at least raised a reasonable doubt that it at least could have been Rewa and not Pora.
Why indeed did they find Teina guilty? Who were the jury? Dont really care who they were but people take their own conscious or unconcious ideals, prejudices, with them, as for the defence lawyer obviously not worth his salt. Wouldnt you say? As for the police i think the above article says it all. Scary!
Don’t underestimate juries. Yes, they can be prejudiced but they are like a superbrain when it comes to the facts. Where they can fall down is in applying the law to the facts.
There is also the old adage; “garbage in, garbage out”.
If incorrect evidence/testimony is fed to a jury, it’s hardly surprising that they will arrive at a bad verdict.
The Arthur Allan Thomas case is a prime example, where two juries arrived at guilty verdicts based (on part) on planted evidence. In such instances, even a superbrain will make a mistake as it has no other evidence to work on.
It is a comfortable fallacy that juries always reach a sound conclusion on the evidence presented to them.
A recent case in point is the Lundy murders. It was practically impossible for Mark Lundy to commit the murders using the scenario and time frames presented by the police/prosecution at the original trial. Yet the jury convicted on that scenario. Clearly something else was at play.
Juries can suffer collectively from prejudices and faulty judgement every bit as easily as an individual.
Just before the Lundy case I used to regularly catch a mini-van between Queensgate and Massey U and so I pretty much followed the route that Lundy would have taken and I didn’t think the time-lines were that unreasonable. Very tight but not unreasonable.
If you know the roads than you know where to put your foot down and cops weren’t interested in policing those areas.
It is my understanding that the police tried to drive the route in the alleged time frame and failed. More than once.
He admitted his guilt under pressure from the police. He was a simple kid who did not understand what was going on. The police pressured him into an admission of guilt. The police were clearly at fault
He admitted culpability after a 14 hour interrogation. This “confession” would have been used in the trial, and given weight despite the complete lack of physical evidence.
They had his taped “confession”, and it’s fairly obvious the jury merely saw snippets of it that “proved” Pora’s guilt (i.e. “he said he did it, so he obviously must have done it”). Had they seen it in it’s entirety (as the privy Council has now done), they probably wouldn’t have fallen for it given all the coercing and contradictions. Also did Pora have one of those State appointed lawyers, or someone that actually cared?
If anyone deserves a massive payout, it’s Pora. Unfortunately, it’s us tax payers that end up footing the bill. So why do we put up with this shit again?
Yes, that seems to be the case, I agree. In hindsight some senior cops got a bit of a bad conscience, hence they started “doubting” the trial and verdict were fair. We know the rest now.
While Teina is now free, and may even be able to claim a fair bit of compensation, the system, which seems to fail again and again, is not being remedied and changed.
I also get so damned sick, how the mainstream media exploit these individual cases, and now turn Teina Pora into a media sensation, some were already also planning a boxing match, to use his profile and publicity to make dollars out of it all.
There are potentially dozens if not hundreds of Teina Pouras in the justice system, I claim, and nobody pays attention to them and the larger problem. We all get presented a “personal story”, exploited by media and soon other commercial enterprises, to pay attention. We do not get presented the abysmal facts, of poor justice in NZ, and that is, because those in power, and in key positions, they want to keep it as it is, no matter some get locked away for long times, while they are innocent.
I call for a new institution to be established, to enable further investigations into disputed legal cases, where there is lack of evidence to convict people, and where they were convicted and punished disregarding that.
So how do we get rid of a corrupt police force? You can bet your backside this tory government won’t do anything about it. Maybe it’s a process that starts with a change of government. You’ve got three wonderful years to think this one through…
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