A challenge to a Napier man’s conviction, prison sentence and historic farm confiscation more than 30 years ago could become New Zealand’s last case before the Privy Council in London – if Shaun Allen has his way.
He says just getting the matter filed with the council, by high-flying London barrister Raban Kherbane, is “a win”.
But if successful, which could be this year, it will show New Zealanders’ right to the last-resort line of appeal in the UK should never have been abandoned, as it was when New Zealand replaced it with its own Supreme Court in 2004.
Only matters predating the change can go from New Zealand to the council’s Judicial Committee, notable cases over the last 25 years being the overturning of David Bain’s convictions for killing his parents and three siblings and Teina Pora’s successful appeal against a teenaged conviction for murder, which led to conviction of notorious rapist Malcolm Rewa.
The older I get, the more skeptical of the NZ Justice system I have become.
I was once of the opinion that NZs Justice system had enough checks and balances in it to ensure innocently people weren’t put away.
I no longer believe that.
I have seen example after example after example of Police behaviour that amounts to deceit, cheating, manipulation and out right falsehoods to get convictions.
That’s why I never felt good about removing the Privy Council from our Justice system because bent Prosecutors working with bent cops work their way up the Totem polls and when their decisions are challenged and found to be false, the system covers its own tracks so its never culpable.
Old boy networks ensure one hand washes the other so that a corrupt miscarriage of justice never gets investigated vy the system that miscarried it.
The Privy Council was beyond the egos of Old Judges with links to the cops. it was really the last place you could argue your case against the State without taint or influence of the State.
That some of our major cases have turned at the Privy Council really does highlight how corrupt the system is.
The Esk Valley farm confiscation was notorious because it was the first one that happened.
The Cops flew over the property, spotted a cannabis plot and promptly misused the new proceeds of crime powers to seize the entire farm and claim it was paid for by the proceeds of the cannabis plot.
It was a bullshit scam of a case to test the new powers and Shaun Allen was the sacrificial lamb…
Allen, now 67, has amassed mountains of material in a fight to prove he had nothing to do with the cannabis plants a police helicopter operation found on the Esk Valley farm in January 1993, nor the seeds later found at his home in Napier.
…I would be extremely surprised if they don’t win this case.
It was always an injustice that he had his property seized by the cops under such flimsy evidence, but that it has to reach out off shore to gain Justice because the bubble of NZ is so tiny and self-interested in hiding abuse by the State.
Good luck Shaun, it’s been one hell of a battle.
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I was interested to find out more about Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s considerations about our legal system and thought he would provide incisive analysis and got two books of his from the library. He has written many. But he is measuring the rightness of the system against legal principles he is familiar with. I am looking at what it does, and how the system can be manipulated, and what outcomes there are for all. I don’t think much of our legal system and country’s administration. I consider as with much else, it has been diminished since Labour brought in neoliberalism or at least opened the way for the really greedy in National et al to limit conditions. Fairness is harder to achieve, with more interest in precedents than in finding good outcomes in disputes and valuing humanity in general.
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