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Focus on
Police Competence |
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A 13-year-old girl,
Auckland police, prosecution and defence lawyers have collectively played a
part in a deplorable miscarriage of justice for three teenage girls who spent
seven bitter months in Mount Eden Women's Prison. But exactly what
everybody's role in the fiasco was remains to be sorted out, as do what
lessons must be learned to minimise, if not prevent, such disgraceful
masquerades from intruding into the New Zealand justice system. Ultimately, the wider
justice system has at least corrected its own error, albeit belatedly, and
due only to the doggedness of a defence lawyer, a private investigator, and
the faith shown by at least one of the girls' parents. The case has rightly
been overturned and the Court of Appeal, in its finding, has stated plainly
enough that both the investigation and the trial system failed. There must now be an
accounting for that. Otherwise there can be
no correction and certainly no guarantees about the integrity of future
cases. The girl lied to the
initial hearing that she and the three others were involved in an aggravated
robbery but now says she was pressured into doing this by the police. She
says she was not involved at all, and that she therefore did not know whether
the other three were. On the face of it,
then, prosecuting police were guilty of the worst sort of tunnel vision. But
this sorry story has more than one face. So much went wrong in this
prosecution that scrutiny should be equally close regarding the part played
by the girl herself, before, during and after the trial, and for that matter
the calibre of the defence. Aspects of this case
are almost incomprehensible. The victim herself did
not believe any of the girls in the dock were the attackers who robbed her
and cut her with scissors. How could it be that the court did not hear that?
The girls in the dock were all conspicuously shorter than the attackers the
victim described, and she was even more sure one of them was not involved
because she knew her through church and had not seen her during the attack. Not only did police
disregard such statements but alibis went unchecked. This raises questions
not only about the conduct of the police but also of the diligence of the
defence. For their part, the
police are now inquiring into their initial inquiry. That will scarcely
satisfy public concerns. No matter how diligent police may be in examining
their own performance, the need for public confidence in the outcome of the
inquiry demands that it be independently conducted. The years of blind public
acceptance of stentorian police assertions -- and there were such years --
have long since passed. The deceptions notoriously committed during the
Arthur Allan Thomas case were probably the turning point. One of the lessons
supposedly learned from the Thomas case was that the New Zealand justice
system is not meant to be so blindly adversarial that facts inconvenient to a
prosecution are able to be kept unavailable to the defence. Overriding all the
particular puzzles of this latest case, the most towering question is why the
police pursued it to court when, surely, so many alarm bells must have been
ringing. The convicted
teenagers, Lucy Akatere, Tania Vini and Krishla Fuataha, will inevitably
receive compensation. While likely to be substantial it cannot, by its very
nature, truly right the wrong that has been done them. |
