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Other convictions need review: Greens
14 May 2007
Other convictions need review: Greens
A number of criminal convictions, such as Scott Watson, Peter Ellis and John Barlow, need to be reviewed following the Privy Council decision on the Bain cases, Green Justice Spokesperson Nandor Tanczos says.
"In his 2006 report into miscarriages of justice, former High Court judge Sir Thomas Thorp suggested that as many as twenty people might be wrongfully imprisoned in New Zealand. He identified the factors that tend to give rise to miscarriages of justice and many of those factors can be seen in operation here," Nandor says.
"Thorp's main recommendation was for an independent Criminal Appeals Review Office, as exists in Canada and the United Kingdom. I strongly support that recommendation and call on the Minister of Justice to indicate what work the government has done to progress this idea," Nandor says.
"Many prominent lawyers, the Criminal Bar Association and the Law Society have all echoed Sir Thomas's call, especially in the wake of the Rex Haig and David Doherty cases. The Justice and Electoral Select Committee backed the idea after it looked into the petitions calling for an inquiry into the Peter Ellis case.
"In the wake of the report, Justice Minister Mark Burton promised to take the recommendations very seriously, to analyse the findings and ask the advice of the legal community. What progress has there been in the last 16 months?
"One of the cases that could be examined by such a body is that of Scott Watson. A recent book by journalist Keith Hunter has raised a number of serious and substantial questions around the conduct of his trial, and those questions need to be answered," says Nandor.
"However, it goes far beyond this one case. The problem is the difficulty of the appellate court system to pick up certain kinds of problems, and this is true all over the world.
"An independent Criminal Appeals Review Office would provide a formal process for dealing with what is a last-ditch chance - a petition to the Governor General.
"Currently that process is ad hoc and often haphazard," Nandor says.
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