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Focus on
Police Competence |
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Three teenage girls
wrongly imprisoned for a crime they did not commit say they have had enough
of waiting for compensation. They now want police to
pay at least part of the compensation they are due while the final amount is
decided. The three spent seven
months in Mt Eden Women's Prison in Auckland after being convicted of an
aggravated robbery in 1999. They were freed when an Auckland lawyer and a
private investigator persuaded police to reopen their case. The Court of Appeal
later overturned the conviction and offered the girls "sympathy".
Lucy Akatere and Tania Vini, both 17, and Krishla Fuataha, 16, said they were
nowhere near the scene of the crime in the Auckland suburb of Three Kings. Police apologised to
the girls but their lawyer Gary Gotlieb said they deserved compensation. The
seven months they spent in jail had changed their lives and seriously damaged
their education. Police began two
inquiries, one into the original crime and an internal report into the way
police handled the investigation. However, Mr Gotlieb
said the issue had dragged on long enough after the police began their
inquiry in April last year. A draft of the internal inquiry was completed
several months ago and handed to Superintendent Howard Broad, the officer in
charge of the Auckland police district. Mr Gotlieb said he had
seen the draft and it failed to look at whether police had failed in their
duties. "It is just not
good enough," he said. Mr Broad had told him he could not look at the
report for two months. Mr Gotlieb would not
say what compensation he believed the girls deserved, but last year when the
Court of Appeal overturned their conviction, he said it could be hundreds of
thousands of dollars. "I would prefer it
to be confidential," he said. |
