Learning from our mistakes

Cleared of murder, Alan Hall has just been awarded $5 million in compensation for wrongful conviction. But Phil Taylor argues flaws in the justice system remain unaddressed.

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Today, it's a no-brainer that Alan Hall was wrongfully convicted of the 1985 murder of Arthur Easton and of wounding his son Brendan. Why it took so long and whether we will pause to learn the inherent lessons are important questions.

The prosecution case had multiple problems, the most alarming being changes to an eyewitness's statement without his knowledge. In its unaltered form, the statement would have meant Hall, a Pākehā, could not have been the man the witness saw the night Easton died of stab wounds in his Papakura home.

In the altered version, the witness's emphatic description of the offender as Māori was removed and an assertion was added that the witness had identified a sweatshirt from Hall's home as the one worn by the man he saw, when the witness had not been shown it. All other evidence that might have alerted the defence to these prejudicial changes was concealed.

In its judgment quashing Hall's convictions, the Supreme Court said, "The crown accepts that such departures from accepted standards must either be the result of extreme incompetence or of a deliberate and wrongful strategy to secure conviction." As well as a renewed homicide investigation and an Independent Police Conduct Authority inquiry, police are looking into the deception at the heart of this miscarriage of justice.

Hall was denied justice by a series of failings following his wrongful conviction. For cases like his, getting to the point of exoneration is often frustrating and almost always exhausting. It can take years, sometimes decades. Then, when we get there, too often we are content to learn very little.