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Focus on
Police Competence |
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There were holes in the
police evidence big enough to drive a truck through, yet three Pacific Island
teenagers were still charged, convicted and imprisoned for a crime they did
not commit. It would never have
happened if they had been from Remuera - but being poor and powerless, the
odds were stacked against Tania Vini, 14 at the time, Lucy Akatere, 15, and
McCushla Fuataha, 14. Betrayed by an inept
police investigation and indifferent legal representation, they spent seven
months in Mt Eden women's prison at a time when they should have been
worrying about nothing more serious than homework and boyfriends. When the Court of
Appeal finally quashed their convictions for aggravated robbery last October,
Justice Gault admitted the investigation and trial system had failed in this
case. The wrongful conviction
also raised "questions of conduct by the police which is a serious
matter and must be properly investigated". These questions are so
far unanswered. Nearly a year later the girls are still in a holding pattern
while decisions are being made about whether they deserve to get
compensation. It's disturbing to
think that we would never have got to this stage if it hadn't been for the
stubborn persistence of Tania Vini's parents - the heroes of this piece. Vini Kavi, a 61-year-old
welder, and his partner, Kaiei "Cathy" Timi, a cleaner, always
believed their daughter when she said she was not involved in the aggravated
robbery of a 16-year-old girl. It wasn't just that
they had always been able to tell when she was lying to them. It was that
they had proof from the start that should have ruled her and her friends out.
They told the two policemen that on the Sunday they came to their modest Mt
Roskill home with a search warrant. One of them was former
test cricketer Trevor Franklin, whose bullying tone made 14-year-old Tania
cry and so incensed Cathy that she told him she wished she could slap his
face. He didn't listen when
Tania and her parents protested that there was no way she could have been at
Three Kings at the time a group of girls were attacking the girl, slashing
her with a pair of scissors and robbing her of $10. Though neither parent
was home on the morning of the assault (Cathy was at her cleaning job and
Vini was at work in Glen Innes), Vini always called the kids from work to
make sure they were getting ready to go to school. He called three times that
Friday, the last time at 7.57am (which Telecom confirmed). That would have made it
physically impossible for Tania and her best friend Lucy to be at Three Kings
at the time of the assault. But for reasons known only to themselves the
police never checked the phone records. Cathy and Vini were
confident the truth would emerge, but over the next year their sense of
helplessness grew as they turned up for one court appearance after another.
Ashamed and worried that she would not be trusted to clean in a supermarket,
Cathy lied to her boss to get time off. The day Tania and her
friends were found guilty was the worst of their lives. Tania ended up
spending her 16th birthday in Mt Eden. She and Lucy were sentenced to 18
months, McCushla to two years. Vini was so distraught
that he could not work for three months. He hired a private investigator, who
cost him $4000 and came up with nothing. When he finally lost patience and
demanded action, the bogus investigator took him to criminal lawyer Gary
Gotlieb, who brought in a former cop, Bryan Rowe. It did not take Rowe
long to spot the glaring discrepancies in the police case. Such as the fact
that none of the girls matched the victim's description of her attackers as
ranging in height from 5ft 6in to 6ft tall. All three girls are below average
height, Tania barely over 5ft. The victim had also
never been asked to identify the girls before she saw them at the High Court,
so she didn't realise that she knew one of them from church. She stated later
that she didn't think the three were her attackers, but she didn't say so at
trial because she wasn't asked. Rowe also talked to the
13-year-old key witness who said police had pressured her into lying about
her involvement and that of the other three girls. Since being freed,
Tania has tried to pick up the pieces and move on. She went back to Mt
Roskill Grammar and lasted a week in the sixth form. She had fallen too far behind,
she said, and felt unwelcome. She is hoping to study social work at
university. Her mum cleans at
nights now so she can be home in the mornings. Vini takes her to her first
cleaning job at 6 and when she finishes at 10 he picks her up and takes her
to her next cleaning job. He is there to pick her up again at 3am. Last week, the Minister
of Justice, Phil Goff, announced that he had appointed a QC to look into the
question of compensation. It seems like a
no-brainer to me. These are girls who
could least afford the disruption to their lives and schooling. Yet they have
had no counselling since being freed, one of them has had a baby, and all
are, to varying degrees, wounded and fragile. The system failed them
once. It should not fail them again. |
