A wrongful conviction and the question of who decides what evidence matters

A former High Court judge has told a trial in Auckland that it is for juries, not police or prosecutors, to decide whether a witness description is reliable. The statement comes as two former police officers face charges of attempting to obstruct justice in a case linked to one of New Zealand's most troubling wrongful convictions.

Alan Hall spent 17 years in prison for the 1985 murder of Arthur Easton, who was killed during a home invasion in Papakura. The Supreme Court quashed Hall's conviction in 2022, finding a substantial miscarriage of justice had occurred. Now, two former officers whose names are suppressed are on trial in the High Court at Auckland, accused of wilfully attempting to obstruct, prevent, pervert or defeat the course of justice.

What did the key witness actually see?

The case hinges on the testimony of Ronald Turner. On the night of 13 October 1985, Turner was in his car with his wife when he saw a man acting suspiciously and running across Clevedon Road in Papakura. He told police the man was Māori and about six feet tall. Hall, then aged 23, was 5 foot 7, of slight build and Pākehā.

While some of Turner's evidence was presented to the jury at Hall's trial, his description of the man he had seen was not. That omission is now at the centre of the case against the former officers.

Why a former judge says police overstepped

Former High Court judge Kit Toogood KC, who was working as a prosecutor at the time, was called as an expert witness. He was asked whether it was acceptable to leave such evidence out, even if police deemed it unreliable.

I don't believe that's any ground at all. Reliability was a matter for the jury or the decider of fact in the trial. The fact that either the police or the Crown prosecutor might have thought the evidence was unreliable was not relevant to the decision or the obligation of disclosure.

Toogood stressed how crucial Turner's evidence was to the trial. He said Turner was at pains, in a subsequent interview, to stress his certainty about the ethnicity of the person he had seen running away.

When defence lawyer Paul Wicks KC suggested that assessing the relevance of evidence is subjective, Toogood pushed back. Yes, I do. But I think if you're talking about this case I don't agree that this was a marginal case. I think the materiality of Mr Turner's descriptions of the person he saw as Māori was obviously highly material.

He added that the description must have assisted the Crown's case against Hall, because of Mr Hall's appearance when he was definitely not Māori.

What difference could the evidence have made?

The court also heard from Charles Cato, a defence lawyer who worked on the preliminary hearing ahead of Hall's trial. Cato, who later became a judge for Tonga's Supreme Court, said that if Hall's trial lawyer had known about the witness description of the man running away, it could have made a big difference to how his defence was conducted. If he had that kind of discrepancy, he could have made a great deal of it before a jury.

Under cross examination from David Jones KC, Cato acknowledged that Hall's admission to owning the bayonet used in the killing and possession of a hat found at the crime scene presented a serious problem for the defence. If someone owns the murder weapon and cannot explain how it came to be at a murder scene in a way that exculpates that person, they have a very real problem, don't they? Jones said. Yes, replied Cato.

Hall has been present in the public gallery every day of the trial.

What does this case mean for justice in New Zealand?

This trial raises fundamental questions about the balance of power in our legal system. Who decides what evidence is relevant? Who gets to weigh its reliability? For a country that prides itself on fairness, the case of Alan Hall serves as a stark reminder that justice can be fragile. As the trial continues, it will test not only the actions of two former officers but the integrity of the institutions meant to protect us all.