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The Press
A strange tension grips a
courtroom after a knock on the jury- room door, indicating the jury is ready
to deliver its verdict. By the time the judge takes his
seat and the jury foreman or woman stands to announce the decision, the
atmosphere is expectant but as sombre as a funeral. When the accused is a person of
standing and wealth, and the charges are very serious, the hush before the
verdicts lies even heavier on the court. So it was yesterday as a
businessman waited to hear what his peers had decided about his guilt or
innocence on sex charges arising between 30 and 40 years ago. He tapped his feet and swung from
side to side on his swivel chair. A large contingent of his family,
many of whom had sat in court for the entire two weeks of the trial, waited
tensely in the back of the court. Then, as the verdicts were read
out by the foreman -- seven guilty verdicts -- it was all over quickly. The jury always faced a daunting
job, confronted by conflicting accounts from the accused and the complainant.
As presiding Judge Panckhurst
said, one of them had to be lying. According to the complainant, the
accused had persuaded her to masturbate him and perform oral sex on him from
when she was eight years old. "It was fun," she told the court. She
was young and didn't know any better. By the time she was 13, the
indecencies had progressed to intercourse, the first act occurring on a
picnic table while she was dressed in her school uniform, she claimed. Over the years the sex continued,
the accused taking opportunities where he could, she said. She never fought, struggled or
cried because he was a father figure. She felt trapped, and it had become a
"habit" with him. The offending stopped when she
started going out with other men, but in 2003 the accused had come to her
workplace and suggested they "have a f... out the back". That had made her angry and in a
letter she never sent, she wrote she "did not want to escalate this to
the point of a media frenzy" and asked the accused to "demonstrate
some ability to make amends". She was eventually offered a house
by another member of the accused's family, but by August 2004 she had gone to
the police. In the background, her lawyer
carried on with negotiations, showing, said defence counsel Jonathan Eaton, a
calculated ploy to ratchet up the pressure on the accused. However, the correspondence and
telephone calls on the issue were said by the prosecution to show a man
trying to buy his way out of trouble but cleverly using other family members
to make offers. The current partner of the complainant
told the court he made notes of a telephone call from the accused in 2004
when the accused "made no effort to deny" the complainant's
allegations that they had just talked about. "He did plainly acknowledge
by saying whatever went on between him and (the complainant) was
regrettable," the partner said. All the accused was acknowledging
was one act of consensual sex when the complainant was 17, Eaton said. The main problem for the Crown
(represented by Philip Shamy) was the obvious inconsistencies and changes in
the complainant's accounts. She could not remember where she was living, for
instance, when she had gone home, bleeding and sore, for a bath after
allegedly being sodomised by the accused. She was shown to get locations and
cars wrong. Eaton was able to demonstrate, using documents such as property
titles and car registration forms, that she was badly mistaken on many
occasions. He highlighted her account of
having sex for the first time with the accused in Rakaia, when she was 13, as
demonstrating why she could not be trusted. Over the course of police
interviews, testimony and cross- examination, the complainant changed her
story about the car the accused was driving and where they had sex. Worried about pregnancy after the
incident, she came up with varying accounts of what she had done to address
the concern. The story changed from her going
to her family doctor to Family Planning, to another doctor, and to her
mother, who could not remember the event. She then suggested the accused "might
have been using a condom". She was "dangerous", the jury would
have to conclude, Eaton said. Shamy countered by asking what the
complainant stood to gain by lying. And if she was lying, wouldn't she have
done a better job? "Do you call her a liar because
she got the car wrong?" he asked. You could not blame a vulnerable
person for getting details wrong 30 to 40 years after the event, he said. Another string to the defence bow
was the fact the complainant had not come up with allegations of the accused
touching her and getting her to masturbate him until two years after making
her first approach to the police. How could it be that she suddenly
remembered these acts just at the time it appeared the family was negotiating
to satisfy her demands of a house and school fees for her son, Eaton asked. Shamy described the late
disclosures as a "peeling of the onion". Of huge importance in the case
were witnesses who gave evidence of what the complainant had told them about
her sex life 30 to 35 years ago, when she was still a schoolgirl. The
accounts helped to show she had not concocted the events and could be read as
confirming her allegations. Three witnesses said they often
had intimate conversations with the complainant, during which she regaled
them with accounts of her sexual escapades with the accused. They were horrified and
titillated. Several witnesses spoke of the complainant's infatuation with the
accused, and one witness said the complainant believed he loved her. The accused faced another problem
presented by the witnesses who knew the complainant as young teenagers. One said he had put his hand on
her vagina when he was driving a farm truck and oddly talked to her about
needing a bra. The other recalled an incident at the complainant's house when
the accused had put his arm around her, nuzzled her neck, touched her right
breast and seemed to suggest she go inside with him and the complainant. Unfortunate misinterpretations,
said the defence. "A lot of misinterpretation going on with a lot of
people," the Crown answered. Eaton had an explanation for what
he described as the constant chattering about sex by the complainant.
Infatuated with the accused and possessing an over-active imagination, she
had fabricated a fantasy sex life with him and found she got rapt attention
from her school buddies. The fantasies were then repackaged
in adulthood to pressure the accused into financing a lifestyle that she had
failed to achieve with her own efforts. To which the Crown countered:
"Would sodomy have featured in a girl's sexual fantasy?" |
