Earlier this month, supporters of flimsily convicted double-'murderer' Scott Watson held a number of rallies up and down the country in support of his innocence. What surprised me was not the fact that people were prepared to turn out on a cold and dreary mid-winter's afternoon to protest the outcome of a nearly two decades old court case (the evidence, after all, is reasonably clear-cut that several somethings went wrong with Watson's conviction); but rather the image which stole much of the media attention from the marches - that of a seriously and sulphurically vitriolic counter-protester shouting and swearing at Watsonites in opposition to their cause.
I penned an article on the subject a few days prior, and the reaction it got was much the same - dozens of softly positive responses that the case against Watson simply didn't stack up ... and the occasional adamantly convinced accusatory personage dead-set and dead-convinced that Watson was, indeed, the killer.
What underpins these occasional anti-iconoclasts is twofold. First up, that certain people become absolutely hidebound in their opinions when they feel challenged in them (a regrettable fact of political psychology which makes rational, reasonable pugilistic discussion a vastly overrated tool of public discourse); and second, a growing unease in the minds of many at the very idea that we might live in a society and a situation wherein the Justice System *can* get things quite severely wrong - potentially with fairly active police conspiracy and coagulation assisting to bring about the perverse outcome in question.
Particularly in scenarios such as Watson's wherein the only real way for the case to be re-examined with any serious chance of a different outcome eventuating is to have the Government of the day fairly directly intervene ... it's not hard to see why Elite-intransigence as to the system they preside over being potentially iniquitous represents a fundamental barrier to hoped-for justice occurring.
But that's just the thing. We've already seen in several high-profile cases that the Police and Courts CAN and DO get it wrong from time to time. Teina Pora stands out as a substantive modern example of both in action. Earlier, Arthur Allan Thomas was something of the Ur-Instance of same - except in his case with fairly active Police malfeasance in the planting of evidence to secure a manifestly false and repugnant conviction.
Instructively, in Arthur Allan Thomas' case, despite his conviction in two trials he was eventually exonerated when then-Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon (who had taken a personal interest in Thomas' proceedings) ordered an inquiry which eventually uncovered the manifest deficiencies in the case and conviction against him.
But the fate of a man facing potential life imprisonment ought not hang largely if not entirely upon the mere fact of whether or not a Prime Minister is favourably disposed towards him!
Whether in Thomas' case, or the more recent set of proceedings surrounding David Bain, it would appear that in many cases the only thing standing between a potentially flawed or faulty conviction and the utter finality of a lengthy jail-term is the forthright and strident efforts of Concerned Citoyens prepared to do a considerable amount of heavy lifting - both legalistic, journalistic, and financial - in order to fight their chosen man's corner against the overwhelming might of the State. If you're lucky ... you get a crusading All Black or other high-profile celebrity as your advocate-in-chief. If you're not - relative obscurity and maybe a few talkback callers shall comprise the decidedly rag-tag forces available to you.
There has to be another way.
And in the United Kingdom, there is.
There, they have something called the Criminal Cases Review Commission set up exactly and explicitly for this purpose.
Since its inception in the late 1990s, the Commission has referred literally hundreds of serious criminal cases back to the English judicial system, with the vast majority of these (somewhere around seventy percent) having a substantially changed outcome due to the resultant appeals. Obviously, in New Zealand, with our relatively smaller population, the numbers will hopefully be substantively lower. Although even so, it wasn't that long ago that former High Court Judge Sir Thomas Thorpe estimated that as many as twenty innocent men could presently be wrongfully imprisoned.
So why don't we have such an independent review body here at present?
Well, part of the argument against having one is that many people view the New Zealand judicial system as being sufficiently above reproach when it comes to corruption, incompetence or simple intransigence that such an alteration would be simply unnecessary. This is a dangerous attitude to have, particularly in light of a number of well-publicized instances of judicial, police and prosecutorial mishandling at every level up to and including the New Zealand Supreme Court. The small and highly interconnected nature of the upper echelons of New Zealand Society can also make it far harder to establish true independence of verdict on appeal cases - you're almost inevitably going to have at least some degree of connection to other actors who've had a substantive influence over the course of proceedings elsewhere in the community or legal system.
This represented a somewhat smaller problem back when New Zealanders still had access to the Privy Council located over in England (which potentially helps to explain why David Bain managed to get a better semblance of justice by going there rather than relying in exclusivity upon the New Zealand system); however since we've ditched that for the far more localized NZ Supreme Court, that avenue is obviously now lost to us.
In its absence, we have the situation as it presently stands with Watson. A lack of serious judicial options to pursue, and high hopes for political intervention to be brought about by mounting public pressure.
I wrote the article about Watson whose response kicked off this thought-pattern in large part because I wished to add to that pressure. Even a cursory examination of the evidence in Watson's case reveals sufficiently large holes in the official narrative to be able to sail a two-masted 40-foot ketch through.
But while it's great to see a growing and mounting sense of momentum behind efforts to overturn the Watson verdict, the fact remains that a potentially innocent man has languished behind bars for a period of almost twenty years. In this instance, as with a number of others, quite a length of time and an insurmountable amount of suffering could have been largely avoided had there been an alternative pathway towards exoneration and review of problematic cases.
It therefore seems, particularly in light of the National-led government's far more risk-averse approach to political involvement in the judicial process (c.f then-Justice Minister Judith Collins forum-shopping for a favourable report which would avoid the fallout associated with compensating David Bain), that the force of public opposition to the status quo cannot simply be channeled into individual cases if we are to genuinely seek change.
Instead, alongside advocacy for individuals, there must also be a substantive push to change the system itself by adding an independent and politically/socially/establishmentarily unencumbered review body capable of doing what hitherto only Prime Ministers and Privy Councils have been able.
That is - fixing the mistakes which fairly inevitably crop up from time to time in an imperfect justice system administered by and catering to actors and arbiters who are ultimately only human, all too human.
People-power is great, but we deserve to live in a system which doesn't require such heavy weighing-in of public opinion in order to secure the right outcomes.
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