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Focus on
Police Competence |
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It is a horror story
except in the last chapter. Three teenage girls fingered for a crime they did
not commit are confronted with police and a court that do not believe them.
They are convicted. They spend seven months in Mount Eden. Only then does a
tenacious lawyer manage to get a new court to quash their convictions and set
them free. On Tuesday the horror ended
for the three Auckland girls, Teangarua Akatere, Tania Vini, and Krishla
Fuataha, but the business is far from over. Their freedom is not enough. New
Zealanders need to know why the miscarriage of justice occurred, and only a
high-powered investigation will find the facts. At present the true
story is hidden in police notebooks and interview scripts, and in the
extensive report that the police made when the convictions began to unravel.
Some of the true story came out in the successful Court of Appeal hearing, of
course, but not the reasons for the police getting the case so wrong. The superficial
explanation is that the 13-year-old whose evidence put the girls in prison
was shown to be a liar -- and that was enough to overturn the convictions.
What is unclear is why the police accepted her as an honest witness, and used
her evidence as the main prop of their prosecution. The Court of Appeal
wants to know why, and so will New Zealanders. It is bad enough that the
Auckland Three were subjected to so degrading an experience. It is even worse
that we have no assurance that the police failure will not be repeated and
that the errant officers will not face the music. Police Commissioner Rob
Robinson has apologised to the victims; Justice Minister Phil Goff wants to
fast-track the compensation process for people wrongfully jailed; the police
are inquiring into their original inquiry. All well and good, but
insufficient. An independent inquiry is needed. The suggestion that the
police were negligent is too strong, and the issue too important, for the
force to be its own interrogator. The public's disquiet will not be ended
until an outside agent takes an inside look. What needs establishing
is why the police did not check alibis and disregarded the evidence of the
girl who was assaulted. Her account of her attackers did not fit the
descriptions of the girls who were charged. If suppression of so
vital a contradiction was due to negligence the responsible officers should
be punished. If it was due to conspiracy to withhold evidence, they should be
dismissed. A wider issue needs
tackling. Gary Gotlieb, the lawyer who eventually stepped in and got the
Auckland Three released, accuses the police of chronic tunnel vision. They
are far too prone to go for a conviction rather than uncover the detail of
cases. He more and more has to engage private investigators to check police
work. In other words, the police cannot be relied upon to investigate cases
fully and fairly. This can be no more
than partly true. If police tunnel vision were pervasive it would show more
often in the courts -- we would have more cases like that involving the three
Auckland girls. But that it exists at all is worrying because it strikes at
the heart of justice. It means not all accused people are guaranteed a fair
trial, in the sense that all relevant evidence might not be presented. A wide inquiry into the
Auckland case would help clarify the issue. It could identify the faults in
police procedures that allowed such incomplete and inaccurate evidence to be
presented in court, and recommend remedies. This business should
not be overstated, in terms of blaming the police. It probably involves only
a handful of officers and they might have been negligent as the result of a
slack system rather than by participation in a conspiracy. Also, it was a
second police investigation that confirmed the faultiness of the first. It is
plainly wrong to think that police methods of investigation, which have
largely withstood generations of judicial and public scrutiny, are
fundamentally flawed. But what the case of
the Auckland Three shows is that police procedures can lead to a serious
miscarriage of justice. The chances of this recurring should be minimised --
and citizens reassured that they have been. |
