CROWN LAWLESS

Crown Law’s parlous conduct in the false imprisonment of Alan Hall; symptoms and causes of the failure of trust in New Zealand’s Justice System and State Institutions

Arthur Easton was killed in his own home on Sunday, 13 October 1985. His killer remains at large. New Zealand’s Police have never tried to find Arthur’s killer.

Arthur’s sons, Brendan and Kim, were also attacked by their father’s killer. The brothers described the attacker as a powerfully built right-handed Māori man, as did passer-by Ronald Turner, who witnessed the attacker fleeing the scene.

The Police initially described the attacker as a 6ft Māori man. But they then conveniently discovered that a young man named Alan Hall, who lived a few kilometers away from the crime scene, had possessed a bayonet and hat similar to items left at the crime scene. Despite Hall being short, slightly built, left-handed and pink-skinned, the Police then did the following:

• The Police hypnotized Brendon and Kim into retracting their initial written statements that the attacker was a right-handed 6ft Māori man.

• Working with the Crown prosecutor, the Police:

  • doctored Turner’s witness statements, excising any mention of the attacker being Māori or otherwise dark-skinned and adding (intentionally falsely) that a blue sweatshirt of Hall that Turner had seen matched the sweatshirt that Turner witnessed the attacker wearing

  • suppressed (i.e. ensured no Court would ever see) statements from Brendon and Kim and the ambulance driver describing the attacker as Māori

  • presented the doctored evidence to the Court at Hall’s trials

Based on the cooked evidence, Hall was duly convicted and his 1987 appeal failed. Hall was released from prison on parole in 1994 but was recalled to prison in 2012 and spent another 10 years in prison. He was paroled again in March 2022 and in June 2022 New Zealand’s Supreme Court overturned his conviction.

The egregious travesty of justice that Alan Hall suffered has now been well-covered in the media and otherwise on-line.

ACTORS IN THIS TRAGEDY

There are no angels or devils in this world and moral crusading is unedifying. But in the Sorry Saga of Allan Hall, as in any drama, there are good and bad actors…our heroes and villains. The object of this piece is to briefly spotlight some of these individuals, what positions they held, what they did and didn’t do, what they said. Let’s sketch some of the cast.

Wesley-Smith, Journalist

Mike Wesley-Smith is the courageous and tenacious journalist who took up Hall’s cause.

McMinn, Detective Senior Sergeant

Kelvin McMinn was the Policeman who led the investigation into Arthur Easton’s murder. He admitted in 2018 that the Police presented doctored evidence from Turner in Court, claiming they did so on instruction from Crown Prosecutor Peter Kaye.

Kaye, Crown Prosecutor

Peter Kaye was the Crown prosecutor who conspired with the Police to put Hall in prison and keep him there. Kaye stated to journalist Mike Wesley-Smith in 2018 “That [ordering a witness statement to be altered by deleting material aspects of it] is not something I would have done [emphasis added]”. Kaye still plies his legal trade.

Orr, Ministry of Justice Chief Legal Counsel

Jeff Orr led the Ministry of Justice’s concerted obstruction of Wesley-Smith requests for information from the Ministry, including in his responses to Wesley-Smith “It is for Mr Hall to decide whether and how to challenge his conviction”.

Horsley, Deputy Solicitor General

Brendan Horsley was the Deputy Solicitor General in charge of criminal matters when he ignored advice from Detective Inspector Dave Lynch that “It’s a bit ugly, in that a witness that was interviewed at the time of the murder gave a description of the person running away from the scene. The person was described as Māori. The person arrested was European.” Instead, Horsley palmed the matter off to Charlotte Brook, the manager of Crown Law’s criminal legal team.

Horsley is now New Zealand’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. In that role Horsley is currently responsible for overseeing the conduct of New Zealand’s intelligence and security agencies. Yikes!

Brook, Crown Law Criminal Team Manager

Horsley having delegated Hall’s case to her, Charlotte Brook commented to Detective Lynch – in an excruciating understatement - “It’s all a bit untidy” but otherwise saw her role as not to engage with the substance and deal with a manifest travesty of justice but, rather, to diffuse the pesky Wesley-Smith, writing to colleagues “We’ve already dealt with a bunch of requests from Mike WS”, with Horsley chiming in that Crown Law would “Definitely not [respond]”.

Chisnall KC

Someone had, however, been diligently pursuing Hall’s cause. Nick Chisnall KC, working with investigator Tim McKinnel, prepared and led Hall’s successful appeal to the Supreme Court.

Levy KC

Even after Hall’s exoneration, the obfuscation continued. Instructed by Solicitor-General Una Jagose, “independent” investigator Nicolette Levy KC contrived to find “In my view there was no obligation on the Crown lawyers to fully absorb and analyse the material presented by Mr Wesley-Smith, either for the purpose of commenting on it to him, or in pursuit of a remedy for Mr Hall if the material did disclose a miscarriage of justice”. To which Wesley-Smith aptly spat back “The Crown put Allan Hall in prison…the Crown had responsibility to get him out of prison – nobody else.”

Jagose, Solicitor General

Once it was apparent in 2022 that the Crown Law Hall Game was up, current Solicitor General (Head Government Lawyer) Una Jagose naturally feigned surprise and outrage (and arranged Levy’s investigation). In doing so, she studiously evaded the inconvenient truth that by 2018 she had known full well from Wesley-Smith, and ignored, the incontrovertible fact that Hall had been deliberately and falsely jailed.

LESSONS FROM THE HALL PASSION PLAY

What can we make of all this? How can it happen? What does it all mean?

In Peter Kaye we have a currently practising lawyer who, by doctoring Court evidence, deliberately put and kept an innocent man in jail for murder. In the current Solicitor General, Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security and Ministry of Justice Chief Legal Counsel we have lawyers who chose to do nothing, and actively thwarted attempts to free Hall. In Nicolette Levy KC we have a King’s Counsel prepared to conclude that the very State entity that cynically put Hall in jail – Crown Law - had no responsibility to help get him out.

The major myth about Crown lawyers is that they’re even-handed straight shooters who can be relied upon the play fair. In reality, they serve one client, the Crown, and are handsomely rewarded for doing absolutely whatever it takes to serve the Government (and themselves).

These elite lawyers in the State administration are part of a larger bureaucratic elite in New Zealand that is now irredeemably unprofessional, self-serving, blindly beholden to each other and their political puppet-masters and bereft of moral fiber. They’re New Zealand’s pounamu wearing apparatchiks. This Modern Play is a sinister, humorless version of Yes Minister.

Hall’s 2012 recall to prison (for another 10 years) occurred when the Police and Prison authorities falsely claimed that Hall’s consensual filming of sporting fixtures was evidence not of his autistic fixation with sporting activity but of sexual perversion. Hall is not a sexual pervert and there’s only one type of perversion that’s criminalized in New Zealand. Under New Zealand’s Crimes Act “Every one is liable to imprisonment…who conspires to obstruct, prevent, pervert, or defeat the course of justice…”