Not wishing to bury the lead here, So I will say up front that last year Alan Hall's conviction was quashed, and this week, the NZ Government has awarded him NZ$5 million in damages and compensation.
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/...d-imprisonment
"The Government will pay Alan Hall just under $5 million in compensation for wrongful conviction and imprisonment, Acting Justice Minister Deborah Russell announced today.
“The Government accepts Mr Hall’s innocence, and apologises unreservedly for his wrongful convictions and imprisonment,” Dr Russell said."
In 1986, Alan Hall was found guilty of the 1985 murder of Arthur Easton, a 52-year-old man, in a case that has been undoubtedly the worst miscarriage of justice in New Zealand's history.
Arthur Easton and his two teenage sons were attacked by an intruder who forcefully entered their residence wielding a Swiss bayonet. All three were stabbed, Arthur Easton bled to death.
During their investigation, police went door-knocking house-to-house in the neighborhood looking for information. When they met Alan Hall, he admitted he used to own a bayonet, but he gave conflicting information about what happened to it. Police then subjected him to hours of interrogation without a lawyer, on one occasion for eight hours, and another for 15 hours. It was later diagnosed that Hall was autistic, which made him extremely vulnerable to suggestion.
This was a classic case of the police deciding very early on that they had their man, and they stopped looking for anyone else. Instead they framed Hall for the murder, and this is how they did it.
Physical Evidence
There was no physical evidence that Alan Hall had ever been to the crime scene. No blood, no hairs, no fingerprints. Police were never able to show that Hall owned or had ever been in possession of the murder weapon - the Swiss bayonet.
Also, one of Easton's teenage sons had smashed a squash racket over the attacker's head multiple times, deforming the racket until it broke in two, yet Hall had no injuries.
Fabricated Evidence
The teenage boys described their attacker as a 6ft tall, strong Maori. An independent witness also reported that he had seen a tall Maori man running away from the house around the time of the attack. The suspect, Alan Hall was a white, 5ft 7in, slightly-built and asthmatic.
So how did the Police deal with this?
1. The teenage boys were too traumatized to testify in court, so the Police read the boys' statements into the record as evidence (this is allowed under NZ Law). The problem is that the Police edited out the part of the report about the ethnicity, height and weight of the attacker. The judge read that account to the jury, not knowing that the Police had altered it.
2. The Police also used the statement of an independent witness, a person who lived nearby, and who told the Police that the attacker was a tall Maori. Again they edited that statement to remove any mention of the attacker's physical description. They further altered the statement, claiming to have shown him a blue sweatshirt which belonged to Hall; and claiming that the independent witness said that it matched the sweatshirt of the man he saw running away. While Hall actually did own a blue sweatshirt, a receipt showed it was purchased in December 1985, two months after the murder took place. Hall's sister told the court that he had been wearing a red sweatshirt at the time. Again, the judge was unaware of the changes the Police had made to that statement when he read it to the jury.
3. The Police concealed from the defense, the existence of a second independent witness, the ambulance officer who spoke with the two boys on the night of the attack. In the US, this would be a
"Brady Violation" but in New Zealand at that time, there was no
"discovery" requirement - withholding witness reports was legal. There were no discovery rules in NZ until it was introduced in 2012.
This is yet another case, like that of Scott Watson and Mark Lundy, where Police decided early that they had their man, stopped looking for other suspects and proceeded to sledge-hammer ill-fitting evidence into place, hiding exculpatory evidence, and fabricating other evidence is what we call a "fit up" - Police corruption at its absolute worst.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/128...wn-admits?rm=a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongf...n_of_Alan_Hall
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