The Star: June 14, 2018

The Star Latest Christchurch news at www.star.kiwi
Thursday June 14 2018 17
still making sure justice prevails
Have you always specialised in
criminal law?
Well you’re talking early to
mid-60s and specialisation wasn’t
really around to the degree it is
now. If you did court work, you
did all sorts of court work whether
it was civil or debt collection or
what would be seen now as family,
though it was called domestic
back then or it was criminal. If
you were going to have a courtbased
practice you really had to
do everything. Christchurch is
still a comparatively small city, so
if you wanted to make your fulltime
occupation a court lawyer,
you had to do everything.
What are some of your career
highlights?
It is difficult to nominate
individual cases. In a career that
you’ve done close to somewhere
near 100 homicides of various
sorts it really is difficult to
single out cases. Instrumental in
making my name as a criminal
lawyer, which did lead to specialisation
and at the time a quite sensational
trial on the West Coast,
a man called Bailey for killing his
wife. There were extraordinary
circumstances involved in it and
it lead to his acquittal against
quite a mountain of evidence
with the Solicitor-General
himself prosecuting it. About the
same time I acted for the Island
Bay Labour MP Gerald O’Brien
charged with indecencies and
persuaded the senior magistrate
in Christchurch at the preliminary
hearing that the charges
should be thrown out. Having
taken a chance and cross-examined
quite vigorously the two
complainants against O’Brien I
persuaded the magistrate that
their evidence was not worthy of
any credit and the charges should
be thrown out, which is what
he did. So those two cases really
made my reputation and lead to
me specialising in the criminal
field. To nominate cases from
there on is very difficult. In all
of them you hope you’re giving
MEETING: Professor Maan Alkaisi and Nigel Hampton QC outside the CTV site.
PHOTO: MARTIN HUNTER
your best and doing your best
to obtain justice for your client.
You’d pick out and say some of
the allegations against police
officers for kidnapping Rastafarians
in the Ruatoria area, they
were some sensational cases in
the mid to late 80s. During my
period of time in Tonga in the
mid-90s there was a significant
case, which I’m quite proud of
in a way, three people, one of
them now the prime minister in
Tonga. Three people had people
had been imprisoned by Parliament
for contempt of Parliament
and they brought a written
habeas corpus in to be released.
I determined that they had not
been properly summonsed in
front of the house, they had not
been given proper particulars
of the charge or charges, which
they were to face and that they
had not been given a proper trial
so I said that was not withstanding
the certain conventions that
relate to courts not interfering in
Parliamentary processes, that not
withstanding that this was such
a breach of constitutional rights,
rights that were embedded in the
Tongan constitution, that these
three men had to be set free.
You’re glad when you look back
on that and realise there were
pressures on you not to interfere
with Parliament and let Parliament
go its own way. But on the
other hand I saw the rule of law,
fairness and justice required and
constitutional rights required
that these men be set free. So you
look back on those sort of things
and you’re glad you did hold the
line.
How was it working on the
high profile cases like Pike River
Mine and CTV Building?
It bought about quite a change
and it was quite an opportune
moment for in a way, given the
advance of years. It was a chance
to step away for a bit from some
of the stresses of doing criminal
defence work and to look in
and take up totally different
aspects of the law in terms of
public safety and the failures
both individual and collective
to protect people at work in the
case of the Pike River Mine and
both people and work and the
public coming into buildings in
the case of the CTV Building. It
has been quite a change in my
practise and has brought me to
think about some of the issues
that are involved in some of
those aspects of public law. Such
as the protection of peoples,
both workers and members of
the public and what protections
should be afforded to them, what
sanctions should be thought of
and should be imposed or at least
thought of being imposed on
people and corporations involved
in not only the running of such
enterprises, the planning of them
and managing them like mining
and other hazardous enterprises,
but also involved in the designed
and consenting of the buildings
where public have rights of access.
In both instances, in the
mine and the building, the position
that the governmental, both
local and central, governmental
agencies as regulators should play
and whether they are sufficiently
contentious in their performance
of their obligations. In both cases
I would say there were failures of
the regulators in relation both to
the mine and the building.
Is the New Zealand legal
system the best it could be?
What improvements could be
made? What do we do well?
By and large we do have a
very good and uncorrupt legal
system. I stress the uncorrupt.
It’s a trait not to be underemphasised.
When you look
around the world, we are very
fortunate indeed that we have
never had issues of corruption
in the New Zealand judicial
system. That is a very positive
thing. I think our legal system
works quite well but it is under
resourced. It could be better
managed in its years in terms of
the different courts that we have.
They could be better structured
and better managed than they
are, but that’s pretty minor in the
scheme of things.
•Turn to page 19
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