The Southland Times
May 24 2008

Justice doesn't come easily
Editorial

The Kahui trial showed the best and worst of our justice system, writes The Southland Times in an editorial.

A horrified public sought accountability but a jury, properly instructed about its social responsibilities, was not prepared to lower those standards to appease our collective cry, or their own individual ache, for some sort of acceptable closure.

Chris Kahui walked free, acquitted of the brutal deaths of babies Cris and Cru, because reasonable doubt still means something important.

The downside? Nobody need ask. The justice system emerges looking shiny and robust, but two babies are still dead and someone hasn't been made to pay. The police remain satisfied that they charged the person responsible. They have no Plan B alternate offender, and neither should they have.

The twins' mother Macsyna King was targeted by Chris Kahui's defence team, but in the absence of fresh information the Crown cannot with any credibility now disregard the same evidence it presented in his trial to try to rule her out as the killer.

Law Society criminal law committee convener Jonathan Krebs, while calling the jury's decision sound, rightly acknowledges that it leaves people feeling "empty and barren".

There shouldn't be any misunderstanding about what the jury said. It hasn't said that Chris Kahui is innocent; simply that police haven't been able to prove that he's guilty. The jury sat through weeks of evidence, presented in distressing detail, but in the end reached their verdict after less than a quarter of an hour. That was a breathtakingly emphatic result; coming after time enough only for them to have taken an initial vote and realise that they had each, independently, come to the same conclusion.

This decision is something that the police and the Crown Law Office shouldn't dismiss as some kind of aberration. A jury, just one day earlier, acquitted George Evans Gwaze of raping and murdering his 10-year-old niece, Charlene Makaza.

Such verdicts join a mounting body of evidence that a generally more worldly, more challenging stripe of juror is casting an archly critical eye over court evidence. The police are either going to have to work harder preparing their cases beforehand, or more hard-nosed decisions need to be made about whether a case is reasonably winnable.

The police haven't done themselves much good by their sometimes tunnel-visioned approach in well-publicised cases, disregarding evidence, or even potential evidence, that doesn't support the case that is taking shape.

Even in the recent baby Charlene case, the family had been emphatic right from the start that there would be expert evidence to support Gwaze's account of a non-violent death; and police simply didn't pursue it. The family did, and the result was evidence, it seems accepted by the jury, that the supposed injuries suffered by the child were, back in her Zimbabwe homeland, recognised as a relatively common symptom of the type of Aids she had.

Nothing in the Kahui case can make up for the fact that two young lives, lived in brutal torment, have been violently taken and the guilty remain free. We can, and should, remind ourselves that it's important nobody gets railroaded to jail, but we also need to improve our act when it comes to punishing evildoers.