GUEST BLOG: Rose Hollins – The framing of Arthur Taylor
What does it take to be hated by the state? By the crown?
I reckon Arthur Taylor is an incredibly successful, principled, self-taught lawyer against injustice – from inside prison walls – has done way more than enough.
Try: Being part of successful collective legal action by prisoners to try to hold the state to account for brutality inflicted on those behind bars by its employees-with-impunity. But in one of the worst new injustices in my lifetime, still in place, their legal victory for damages was wielded back against all inmates by the government of the day into routine public invitation for anyone to apply for victim recompense against individual jailed victims of such state crimes. Talk about encouraging violent jailers! Lora norder anyone? Wins elections.
Try: His sustained battles to defeat anti-smoking legislation inflicted on all cell-bound inmates, & to regain votes for prisoners – both eventually successful in court but only the second forced government law change. And only partially. Never mind any bill of rights aye.
Try: His also unprecedented achievement in NZ of private prosecution of a paid police secret witness, lying as they do, who Arthur got convicted of perjury for false evidence crucial to the case against the supposed murderer of the Swedish tourists, David Tamihere.
Add: Assisting other prisoners with his hard-won legal nous to also try to use the injustice system for some justice.
And there may well be many other examples – those are just the ones I can think of.
So today’s news of Arthur Taylor facing “a raft of drug charges” should be neither surprising nor damning. The state – the crown – has reasons to hate him. It’s acting like the state does when it’s lost too many times. It has the power & it’s using it.
Good on you, Arthur!
All power to your defence, bro
Rose is a supporter of Arthur’s
After the shit hit the fan over the Christchurch terrorism attack with all the failings being highlighted many of the failings have in fact been largely swept under the carpet. And now we are constantly hearing these lame excuses that it is the systems fault, not the well paid people working in the system making all the decisions, nah its the systems fault they keep saying, fucken bullshit. Now we have our police pursuing Taylor over what? the police need to get a life, stop being personal, grow up and do there job. And now we have our incompetent Worksafe suing over Whakaari Island, yet they themselves are implicit in these deaths occurring, along with many other unnecessary work related deaths. They (Worksafe) have been far to slack for too long and for many years they have dropped there guard. And in the meantime too many NZers have died on the job or not come home to their loved ones. This is not good enough but no doubt they (Worksafe) will join the chorus and say it is the systems fault. Well if it is the systems fault then our government needs to fix the system and this needs to happen now. Or are we going to wait for another disaster?
I am sure the money and time spent on Arthur Taylor could have been used for a better purpose if he had decided to put his obvious mental skills to a lawful project rather than trying to beat the system over a number of years
What is unlawful about holding “the system” to account? Were his legal actions behind bars “unlawful’?
Arthur has been exposing corruption in the Corrections dept,in an effort to silence him,the dept has decided to get even more corrupt than usual….