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Home / police allegations / Rickards,
Shipton, Schollum vs Jane Doe Page 1 - 2007 Trial of
Rickards, Shipton, Schollum Week 1 |
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The sensational trials - plural - involving
suspended assistant police commissioner Clint Rickards will, one day, make a
mini-series. And they will make other melodrama mute by comparison. For the show in Auckland's High
Court last week had everything. Spectral accusers - ghosts from
the past - assuming corporeal form. Allegations of double lives - of
private lives so distinct and remote from the public visage that only Dr Phil
would be able to decipher. And then there is the trial itself
- of impregnable defendants made vulnerable, of a vulnerable complainant made
impregnable by the state and name suppression. Of the Kiwi media seeking to
create their own antipodean version of OJ. Mate, this is not theatre. This is
Shakespeare. And yet without seeking to comment
upon the rightness or wrongness of the allegations, a deep unease surrounds
this trial. For the reek of political prosecution attends proceedings. The
Wellington shadow is everywhere - part police HQ and part political
correctness. Unlike the Louise Nicholas case,
there actually exists no original complaint. This current trial is the direct
result of the police hunting their own - of assumptions made in Molesworth St
and none of them of innocence. The greatest unease is the process by which
this case ever came to trial. According to the complainant's
evidence, it was the police who contacted her and not the other way around.
They had come across an old notebook of Brad Shipton's bearing a five digit
telephone number - some basic sleuthing delivered a modern day address and a potential
victim. What they then said to her, we will never know. We do know that the
subsequent information was of an event that allegedly occurred 23 years ago. That was the first revelation of
this past week. The second was from the complainant herself. She was
determined, she said under oath, to get the conviction that Louise Nicholas
could not. We should know the jury's verdict
within the next few days. They will have been sequestered from much of the
media and warned not to let their knowledge of former events sway their
judgement. It will be a heroic act if they do not. But the trial does raise the wider
issue of historical sexual abuse charges. Should there be a statute of
limitation that applies given that so many descend into he said/she said circularity?
At which stage the onus of proof - and the need to convict beyond reasonable
doubt - apply their own symmetry. A good example is the Louise
Nicholas trial. No other verdict than "not guilty" was obvious from
the opening addresses because there were no witnesses and there was no
physical evidence. As a general rule, any proceeding
that has produced a guilty verdict has been correlated by confession or the
supportive testimony of other victims. The most odious and obvious are those
involving children and paedophiles. But what hope has a singular child who
seeks to find a court-imposed resolution in later years? None. Equally there exists the flipside.
Persons falsely accused of crimes many years after the event. Most involve
estranged families, "recovered" memories and too little medication.
Most times, all three. For the police, it is usually a
bewildering maze. Their internal policy is that every sexual abuse/rape
complainant is automatically believed. Which marks a difference from 20 years
ago, when the unofficial policy was that they weren't. In many ways, the
current spate of historical abuse trials is all about the clash between those
two value systems. Neither make much sense. And yet there is no middle ground.
Each case is a mess of seeming contradictions, claims and counter- claims.
For any jury to be able to divine the truth within such a miasma is to
approximate God. You shudder at how many times the judgement of lesser
mortals gets it wrong. So the standard for guilt remains
as it has always been. Beyond reasonable doubt. Too high a burden for many,
and hence the declining percentage of victims who seek judicial redress. And
yet what alternatives are there? Which brings you back to Clint
Rickards. Whatever the verdict next week, the
trials of Clint Rickards have so muddied his public reputation that I cannot
see him returning, in any active role, to the police. For when the police
turn on their own, they really turn. Wanganui superintendent Alec Waugh a
case in point. Accused, tried and convicted of petty fraud, until the
pressures of his confession were exposed. He was eventually restored to his
rank, but never properly served again. He was not trusted. There can be little doubt that our
police prosecution system requires extensive and urgent review. There is no independent
prosecution service in this country - as with the United Kingdom - that
requires convincing before proceeding to court. There is no independent
Complaints Authority. And there is a lesser standard of individual being
recruited to police ranks these days - smaller, weaker, dumber and less
robust than ever before. Next week, there will be a verdict
in the Rickards, Shipton and Schollum trial. But whatever the outcome, the
loser is already the police. |
