I believe it is impossible to seriously critique the terrible miscarriage of justice against Teina Pora without revealing the naked structural racism still at the heart of our colonial justice system.
A brown teenager with learning difficulties framed by a white police force for a murder-rape he could never have committed rotted in jail because our system is racist.
It really is as horrible as that.
Teina Pora was framed for murder by a Police force, that’s why his compensation offer is so shoddy. $2.5million would be fine if it had been an accident of the system, but that’s not the case here. Using bribed testimony from prison narks and estranged family, the Police compounded their actions against Pora by striving to keep the case from being solved.
Teina rotted in jail so that those who had put him there in the first place would and could never be challenged.
Waatea reports that the UN are now so concerned with our outrageously high Maori incarceration rates that they have mentioned it directly in their most recent United Nations Human Rights Committee report. Sociologist Jarrod Gilbert’s research earlier this year highlighted how culturally crippling that level of incarnation had on Maori and we are about to hit 10 000 prisoners for the first time ever with a private prison who is making a profit from this..
Pora is a symptom of a justice system so engulfed in structural racism that the framing of him by the Police is eclipsed by the grumblings from those who think the compensation deal is too much.
There appears to be a lot of jealousness & spitefulness in NZ about Teina getting the 2.5 million compensation. Its almost like they think he is lucky to get that because he was a young Maori gangster going no where, so he should be thankful for what he gets. It seems many Pakeha NZers think doing 21years in prison for someone like Teina is like water of a ducks back. Very racist and discriminative views and very entrenched. Too many Pakeha NZers think our people (Maori) are conditioned for prison and they belong there this is very sad indeed. We will pay for this in our country and we already are looking at the divisiveness in NZ under the National government and the social media comments and backlash.
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