The Christchurch Civic
Creche Case |
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A number of criminal convictions,
such as Scott Watson, Peter Ellis and John Barlow, need to be reviewed
following the Privy Council decision on the Bain cases, Green Justice
Spokesperson Nandor Tanczos says. "In his 2006 report into
miscarriages of justice, former High Court judge Sir Thomas Thorp suggested
that as many as twenty people might be wrongfully imprisoned in New Zealand.
He identified the factors that tend to give rise to miscarriages of justice
and many of those factors can be seen in operation here," Nandor says. "Thorp's main recommendation
was for an independent Criminal Appeals Review Office, as exists in Canada
and the United Kingdom. I strongly support that recommendation and call on
the Minister of Justice to indicate what work the government has done to
progress this idea," Nandor says. "Many prominent lawyers, the
Criminal Bar Association and the Law Society have all echoed Sir Thomas's
call, especially in the wake of the Rex Haig and David Doherty cases. The
Justice and Electoral Select Committee backed the idea after it looked into
the petitions calling for an inquiry into the Peter Ellis case. "In the wake of the report,
Justice Minister Mark Burton promised to take the recommendations very
seriously, to analyse the findings and ask the advice of the legal community.
What progress has there been in the last 16 months? "One of the cases that could
be examined by such a body is that of Scott Watson. A recent book by
journalist Keith Hunter has raised a number of serious and substantial
questions around the conduct of his trial, and those questions need to be
answered," says Nandor. "However, it goes far beyond
this one case. The problem is the difficulty of the appellate court system to
pick up certain kinds of problems, and this is true all over the world. "An independent Criminal
Appeals Review Office would provide a formal process for dealing with what is
a last-ditch chance - a petition to the Governor General. "Currently that process is ad
hoc and often haphazard," Nandor says. |