Law Society whitewash another disgrace to those tortured and molested in care

What a shocking and deplorable whitewash…

Frazer Barton cleared by inquiry, returns as Law Society president

• Frazer Barton has been cleared to return to work after five months of leave over conduct complaints.
• An independent standards committee found despite Barton’s advice regarding the destruction of children’s records at Presbyterian Support Otago, he could not have known an instruction would then be issued to destroy the records.
• Barton will resume his duties as president, with full support from the Law Society Board.

…Fuck right off!

This sanctimonious immoral fuck advises the Presbyterian Church to burn all its records of abusing children while in their care because he knows there is an inquiry coming and he’s been cleared?

What an abomination for the children who were abused!

This is the exact same bullshit we got from the Solicitor General over this abuse in state care!

The Solicitor General knew children in State care were tortured and they went on to cover it all up…

But Una Jagose’s involvement in the Crown’s response to the abuse of children in state custody long predates her evidence at the Royal Commission. She has been involved over the past 20 years, with a number of others, including Collins. 

“Political and public service leaders spent time, energy and taxpayer resources to hide, cover up and then legally fight survivors…”

So who else was aware of these crimes and what was their response?

The Royal Commission’s report makes clear there was a repeated failure to disclose “relevant information damaging to the Crown case”.

The UN’s finding that New Zealand was in breach for failing to investigate Lake Alice can principally be laid at the feet of Helen Clark’s government, but it had its genesis even earlier and continued on into the John Key government. There was a failure to look for information and a failure to provide it to the relevant authorities to do their job to investigate criminal offending against children and breaches of international law.

There had been failures to investigate in the 1970s when racial justice advocate Dr Oliver Sutherland and his colleagues at ACORD (Auckland Committee Opposed to Racial Discrimination) exposed abuse occurring at institutions like Owairaka and later at Lake Alice. An inquiry into Lake Alice at this time was essentially a whitewash and crucial evidence was withheld. 

But when victims became adults they began filing civil litigation against the Crown in the 1990s regarding Lake Alice. The first victim to file a case was Leoni McInroe, represented by Rob Chambers QC. Another group of nearly 100 victims were later represented by lawyer Grant Cameron.

Bill English was the minister of health in the National government of the 1990s before the role was handed off to Wyatt Creech. During internal discussions regarding the claims made in civil cases about Lake Alice, officials and ministers from other government departments were also alerted to allegations of sexual and physical abuse in social welfare homes. Many of the Lake Alice victims had been through these institutions before they got to Lake Alice. Agencies including Social Welfare, Treasury and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet were looped in to these discussions. Dame Margaret Bazley was chief executive of the Department of Social Welfare at the time.

In 1998 a paper was presented to Cabinet by English and countersigned by Dr Janice Wilson, director of mental health and chief advisor.

Collins’ denial at the United Nations that New Zealand committed torture was not only not true. It was also an insult to the victims and continued the 50-year injustice they’d experienced since their childhoods.

The central claims and the facts underlying the civil claims around Lake Alice were clearly known to the government by this stage. The Cabinet paper outlined them, stating:

“Their principal allegation is that they received paraldehyde and/or unmodified electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for the purpose of punishment. Unmodified ECT is ECT without anaesthetic or muscle relaxant to counter the side effects of this form of treatment. Paraldehyde is an anti-convulsive drug. It can cause extreme pain when used extramuscally.

“This treatment is alleged to have been administered by nursing staff at the hospital and by the unit’s head Dr Selwyn Leeks. The former patients also allege that they were sexually and physically abused by adult patients at the hospital and by staff.

“The claims relate to the period 1972 and 1978. At that time the majority of the former patients ranged in age from 10 to 14.

…look at the legal tricky that was used to force the abused into being further traumatised!

Look at the appalling tactics used and weep in fury at the way we treated these kids abused in our care…

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into abuse in state care looked into the Crown’s litigation strategy against survivors who filed legal claims about their abuse. It said the the conduct of the Crown went beyond mere neutral defence of claims.

It included “causing long, avoidable delays and failing to keep claimants adequately informed of the progress of their cases” as well as:

• • failing to disclose relevant information damaging to the Crown case
  • opposing reasonable adjournment requests, despite a lack of prejudice to the Crown, when a claimant’s lawyer was without funding
  • cross-examining witnesses to suggest survivors should have, as children, disclosed abuse at the time the abuse happened, or avoided the abuse
  • cross-examining witnesses to suggest survivors were lying and colluding even when the evidence showed they were more than likely to be telling the truth
  • making applications for costs against survivors personally, and making applications for orders that would have required the plaintiff to pay costs if they had not been funded by legal aid.