Allegations of Abuse by NZ Police
	peterellis Home / police allegations / Rickards, Shipton, Schollum vs Jane Doe Page 7 - Further Reaction to Not Guilty Verdict
	Taranaki Daily News March 7 2007 A dangerous time to consider dumping a wise legal tradition Editorial People with all manner of agendas are climbing on the bandwagon rumbling along in the wake of the so-called police rape trials. There is a rising clamour to dispense with the judicial tradition of keeping secret all prior convictions. At least there is a selectively rising clamour to dispense with prior convictions in sex cases -- most significantly featuring comments by the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, and being passionately campaigned by the organisers of a protest about the conduct and results of these trials and rape trials generally. Miss Clark has asked the Law Commission head to review the legislation and processes surrounding automatic suppression -- a task happily shouldered by her old political colleague and legal activist, Sir Geoffrey Palmer. This follows the PM's dismay at the evidence withheld from successive police-rape trials. Her inference is that the jury in the second trial involving the suspended Auckland Area Commander, Assistant Commissioner Clint Rickards, and former colleagues Bradley Shipton and Robert Schollum from the Rotorua CIB 20-plus years ago, might have come to guilty verdicts had the men's history been made available -- especially Shipton and Schollum's convictions in a third trial. In the emotion still swirling around the cases, their dramatic finale last week and two women -- and countless supporters -- feeling aggrieved that their harrowing stories could not be relied on alone by the juries, it is a dangerous time for sweeping statements and rushing into the complex task of writing new legislation. Besides, there already exists in law the opportunity for courts to admit extraordinary and compelling evidence that could fairly be seen to have a place in a subsequent trial. Overthrowing, in wholesale fashion, the long-standing convention of withholding criminal histories from juries -- but making them available to sentencing judges after the jury decides on conviction -- would be a big price to pay to satisfy those baying for blood at this delicate stage. It is naive to imagine that lawyers and judges could wholly prevent juries from considering prior criminal behaviour, even when they are advised to ponder only the evidence pertaining to the current charge. It would be beyond the human condition to achieve that high standard every time -- not when juries' ears are also echoing with startling, but possibly irrelevant, information from earlier incidents. Clearly the Prime Minister believes that juries would be influenced by such history -- at least in relation to sex cases that otherwise have little in the way of corroborating evidence. But can this dispensation be limited only to sex-crime trials? Doesn't the law have to be applied equally, in spirit and across the criminal spectrum? The police and Crown prosecutors would dearly like to show juries a defendant's "rap sheet" in the full expectation that it would sway the verdict. And the media would prefer the American system of open slather on the prior history of those arrested for high-profile crimes. But the overriding object of the exercise is a fair trial that makes every possible attempt to avoid wrongful, prejudicial conviction.