The tragedy of the Allan Hall miscarriage of justice
Alan Hall miscarriage of justice trial: Auckland judge acquits ex-cops of wrongdoing in murder case
Two elderly retired cops who were excoriated by the Supreme Court in 2022 – accused of either ineptitude or corruption for their help getting Alan Hall wrongly convicted of murder decades earlier – have been found not guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice.
The defendants, who continue to have interim name suppression, sat in the dock at the High Court at Auckland today as Justice Ian Gault announced his reserved decision nearly a month and a half after their trial began.
In a 127-page judgment issued later in the day that outlined his reasoning, the judge acknowledged that the non-disclosure of a witness statement at Hall’s 1986 trial “had the tendency to prevent a court from doing justice”. He also noted that a third party not on trial “may have made a (serious) mistake”.
But it was “largely speculative” to assume the two defendants on trial knew their actions would lead to the miscarriage of justice, he surmised.
NZ Herald
I’m not surprised by this result.
It focused on an isolated part of this terrible miscarriage of justice and only serves to highlight how very damaged our Court system is.
It was never about how eye witnesses mistook someone for Māori and Police never passing those details along, it was far more damaging than that.
The report released in 2023 was incredibly damning not just of the Police who framed Allan, but the entire judicial system…
‘It’s nothing to do with us’: Officials ignored warnings over Alan Hall case
A new report outlines how evidence of Alan Hall’s wrongful conviction was known to Crown lawyers and police for years, but officials did nothing.
Hall was convicted of murdering Arthur Easton in 1985, and spent more than 19 years in prison. He was finally acquitted by the Supreme Court last year.
In the wake of this, the Solicitor-General ordered an investigationinto the Crown’s role in Hall’s case.
The review, by Wellington lawyer Nicolette Levy, KC, was completed in November, but a heavily redacted version was only been released on Friday.
It details how Crown Law, which oversees all prosecutions in New Zealand and handles appeals, was sent detailed information by former Newshub journalist Mike Wesley-Smith in 2018, and again in 2020. The information showed crucial witness evidence had been deliberately altered and withheld by police and the prosecution during Hall’s trial and appeal.
Stuff
…they knew they had framed an innocent man and no one in the system lifted a finger!
It is an obscenity that became an abomination.
Anyone reading the Alan Hall case would be shocked at the blatant framing of him for this crime.
You honestly get the perception after reading the reports that the cops simply rounded up the most vulnerable person near the crime and bullied him into answers that were used to frame him while withholding evidence that proved he didn’t do it.
They knew Alan couldn’t have committed the crime, but the simply framed him anyway because their interrogation techniques are manipulative and have little to do with catching the actual criminal and more to do with simply finding a prosecution.
With the recent litany of miscarriage of justice cases, seeing the inside of a corrupted police interrogation process happening in real time now suggests the Police have learned NOTHING from the mistakes and failures of the past, which is what we have been promised every time one of these miscarriages of justice get exposed.
Look at how the NZ Police bullied false confessions out of people in the Lois Tolley murder case…
Police are refusing to release a review of the controversial investigation into the murder of Upper Hutt woman Lois Tolley, sparking accusations that they are covering up serious misconduct.
Tolley, 30, was shot point-blank in her home in December 2016, in what police described at the time as “an execution-type killing”.
After an extensive investigation, named Operation Archer, three men were eventually charged in 2019 with her murder.
But the charges against all three men, who have name suppression, were dropped by police last year, before the case went to trial, with a judge commenting: “There is presently really no evidence against any of them.”
…It is unacceptable in the extreme for the Police to not release this investigation into what went wrong with that case!
To have gotten prosecution this far advanced without any actual evidence because the police interrogation technique was so corrupted is gasp inducing in its conclusions…
This followed revelations that one of the accused had falsely confessed to the murder, after police used a contentious interviewing technique, the Complex Investigation Phased Engagement Model (CIPEM).
…the whole case became so tainted with the inclusion of jail house narks and unreliable witnesses that there had to be an investigation into how badly Police screwed up…
High Court Justice Simon France said the man, known as X, had been manipulated by the detectives interviewing him, who had broken numerous fundamental rules of interviewing, and X’s “confession” was flawed and not credible.
The case against the other two men collapsed for separate reasons, largely related to the unreliability of key witnesses – including a woman twice charged with perverting the course of justice, and jailhouse informants with numerous convictions for dishonesty, who told conflicting stories.
In a rare move, police subsequently appointed Auckland King’s Counsel and former Crown prosecutor Aaron Perkins to undertake “an independent review of aspects of the police inquiry”.
…the corruption of credible evidence and process was so extreme that there had to be an independent investigation into how the fuck it got this far.
Turns out we won’t be allowed to know because the Police are now refusing to release the report…
However, police refused to release the terms of reference for Perkins’ review, making it unclear which parts of the failed investigation were being looked at and whether he was considering why the case collapsed against all three defendants, or just X.
Perkins’ review was completed in August.
But police are now refusing to release the report, or even a summary of its findings, saying it is “confidential and legally privileged”.
…unbelievable!
Yet it manages to get worse!
The defence lawyers of the men falsely set up using jailhouse snitch ‘evidence’ and this weird Complex Investigation Phased Engagement Model (CIPEM) have all complained about tactics used by Police that are absolutely outside the law, like with holding evidence that proves their client innocent!
Wintour said that during the investigation, police deliberately hid material from him until the last minute that suggested his client wasn’t involved in the murder.
Yet it manages to get worse!
The refusal to release the report follows continued efforts by police to withhold material relating to the Lois Tolley investigation and the CIPEM interviewing method.
Stuff has twice been forced to get court judgments in order to obtain access to relevant documents.
It also comes after the retirement of the country’s top investigatorand architect of CIPEM, Detective Superintendent Tom Fitzgerald, earlier this month.
Fitzgerald was closely involved with the interviews of X, but he insisted CIPEM wasn’t to blame for mistakes made by the interviewing detectives and said his retirement had nothing to do with scrutiny of the technique.
So the model being used allows Detectives to lie, bully and manipulate false confessions and the Detective Superintendent who created this model used in the Lois Tolley case, originally claimed the Detectives misused the model and it had nothing to do with him, when it turns out that wasn’t true and that he was actually monitoring the interview from a seperate room and was advising during the interview.
Yet it manages to get worse!
Detective Superintendent Tom Fitzgerald also was responsible for that other great questionable miscarriage of justice case, the murder of Olivia Hope and Ben Smart.
Based on what we currently have in front of us with that case and the recent miscarriages of justice cases of Peter Ellis, Teina Pora, David Lyttle, Mauha Fawcett David Doughty, David Tamihere and Alan Hall you get a terrible feeling that Police are not following the evidence in case, but are merely rounding up the most vulnerable suspects and bullying confessions out of them or twisting the evidence to fit the crime.
What is being exposed here is a rotten process that reeks of a cultural corruption. I once thought that maybe as much as 5% of the prison population might be innocent, after looking at what has been starkly revealed in this police interrogation process, I think that number might be closer to 30% of the prison population being innocent.
Every time we catch the NZ Police out using deeply controversial interview techniques, they promise they won’t ever do it again, and then we catch them doing it again!
Look, none of us will understand the pressure to catch someone for a terrible crime, that is a unique pressure on Police and Detectives, but if all they are doing is framing people for crimes they didn’t commit just to get closure on cases, that is not justice.
That is an abomination!
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Every miscarriage of justice is a disgrace and for it to not be acknowledged for years is another knife in the back of the innocent who have clearly been ‘framed’ in an effort to get the result wanted, even if it isn’t true! The Alan Hall conviction is a prime example of how Police can twist and manipulate the results to suit their mindset. We all know to get into the Police Force does not require a high IQ and that’s not denigrating those who are there for the right reasons. This is not an isolated case! Why can’t unscrupulous Police be made accountable for their actions and why is our Court system so corrupt? Appalling that Alan Hall’s wrongful conviction was known to Crown lawyers and Police for years BUT they did nothing!!!! Yes Martyn, “it’s an obscenity that became an abomination”. Corruption breeds more corruption!
We have the best justice system that money can buy along with a presumption of police infallibility among most of the population so getting a conviction is considered more important than actually convicting the guilty person as has been demonstrated numerous times.