Why Scott Watson still matters
Scott Watson murders: Supreme Court to review witness evidence
NZ Herald
This week, the Supreme Court of NZ reopened the Scott Watson murder case and will consider submissions regarding the reliability of witness Guy Wallace, who identified Watson as having been with the young couple on a water taxi the last time they were seen alive.
The 1998 murder of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope in the Marlborough Sounds is one of NZ most notorious double homicides and one of our most questionable convictions.
There have always been enormous question marks over this case and it is right for the Supreme Court to review it because this could be a cruel miscarriage of justice.
For me it never sat right that boat people saw a double masted Ketch and not the single masted boat Watson had.
The convenient finding of hairs belonging to Olivia used to frame Scott Watson.
The use of prison narks to frame Watson and most disturbingly, the fact that Police OffIcers involved in the Scott Watson case later went on to develop interview programs for the NZ Police that were found to be incredibly unsafe and produced false confessions.
There’s a war on, the economy is melting down and we have run away climate change to worry about, but if Scott Watson is not guilty, we have kept an innocent man in jail for 27 years for two murders he didn’t commit.
We need to give a damn about that.
Yes we need to care, there was more than one witness regarding the double masted Ketch yet the police refused to listen to any of them as they work on the basis of finding a suspect then making the evidence convict them instead of finding all the evidence then using that to find who is guilty.