Posts by Matthew Poole
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Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to Bart Janssen,
a (perhaps unachievable) system that accepted that in some crimes attacking the victim to create doubt is not the mark of a civilised and virtuous society.
I think it is unachievable. Peter Ellis is a pretty good example of what happens when the victims are considered unimpeachable (after some seriously fucked-up coaching, admittedly). Slut-shaming of victims of rape is not civilised, but it's also not civilised to take accusations of rape as gospel without any examination just because it's traumatic to real victims to try and weed out false accusations.
Possibly taking sexual crimes from adversarial to inquisitorial trials would work, but the victim is still going to have to undergo some degree of re-living the crime in such a court and the judge is still going to have to establish a clear absence of consent in the cases which are not nicely black-and-white (and most rapes aren't a woman being dragged into an alley). -
Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to Carol Stewart,
a lawyer friend once told me that there is a legal principle that it is better for a guilty person to go free than for an innocent person to be locked away.
Blackstone's formulation. I'd heard it as 100 guilty go free, which is attributed to, amongst others, Benjamin Franklin, so at least knew where to start with Google. It's all Biblical and shit.
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Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Q. 1 If the person in the spotlight didn’t commit the murder, then who did?
Q. 2 Why are the police so seemingly incompetent in such cases?
In the Kahui case, it's actually quite hard to tell who actually did it. Chris was statistically likely to be the culprit (common-law partner of the mother), but pretty much everything was circumstantial. It takes no real force to fatally injure an infant so no way of narrowing the suspect pool that way, and without any witnesses coming forward solving it conclusively was always going to be a tough ask. Without reverting to methods of interrogation that are best left to the CIA, the police couldn't compel anyone to talk. That's not incompetence, that's just the reality of being a country where there's something approximating respect for due process in the face of a whole family that closed ranks to protect a murderer.
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Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to Keir Leslie,
Remember, the jury don’t hear all the evidence. They hear two stories constructed by two groups of advocates using the evidence that falls within the rules of admissibility.
Bingo. The jury doesn't hear close to everything, even in a very simple trial, and with these cases we're seeing rulings that evidence/information required to be disclosed to the defence was withheld during discovery and thus not scrutinised in court. It might not make the speculation any better-informed than were the juries' deliberations, but it does show that there was very much a culture of doing nearly anything required to get a conviction.
Mark Lundy's entire trial hinged on the possibility of averaging 176km/h not once but twice within a three-hour window and for well over 100 kilometres each way, on some very heavily policed roads, and that was not any kind of secret. There's nothing uninformed about speculating about how wildly improbable that is.
Scott Watson's trial raised a mystery boat, of a type identified by someone with knowledge of boats, that was never located. Don't have to be sitting in the jury box to be asking why that boat wasn't tracked down as a matter of priority.
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OnPoint: The Big Guns: Truecrypt and Tails, in reply to BenWilson,
even if I was using a OTP, which I probably wouldn’t.
The problem with OTPs is that their use requires an initial secure distribution channel, which really limits their use for communications between people who have never met. The intelligence services make use of diplomatic conventions and spycraft, but most people don't have that option which means they've already got a highly secure communications conduit that negates the need for an OTP.
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Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to Damian Christie,
all the talk of flakiness around those cases might have more to do with those ill-informed dinner table discussions, rather than a spate of particularly flaky cases.
We know for absolute fact that there was prosecutorial misbehaviour in Lundy, with things withheld from the defence. Bain was ruled an unsafe conviction and sent back for retrial. We all know about Peter Ellis. Teina Pora is from the same era and looks to have been very, very shady. Tamihere was pursued with an end goal in mind, and subsequent discoveries destroyed the police case.
The Privy Council has issued rulings on two of these that support the "ill-informed dinner table discussion", at least in part, and there's enough out there on these other cases to raise valid questions about the police having apparently decided on a suspect and then done whatever was required to achieve the conviction.
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Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to Tom Semmens,
Oversight of the police has got worse, and legal aid has been stripped.
"got worse"? Really, Tom? Really?! You mean, it's worse now with an actual, statutorily-independent oversight body, than it was when the police literally investigated their own? Actually, really, got worse?
As for legal aid, that's a fairly recent occurrence. There's a big gap between Lundy, and National's "adjustments" to legal aid. Many years. You're trying to claim that there's a whole heap of dirt in those seven years which just hasn't come to light? The Bain, Watson and Lundy cases were considered flaky as the cell doors closed. I was 10 at the time of Tamihere so I don't know if the case was considered dubious at the time, but it's been considered questionable for a lot of years.
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Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to Tom Semmens,
But what is emerging is a constant pattern of police over-reach with evidence that amounts to incompetence.
Damian's caveat about the prosecution aside, there's a clear decade-ish starting with David Tamihere and roughly ending with Mark Lundy where a number of high-profile murder investigations appear to have been conducted with the killer firmly determined very early on in the piece. Whether that period has totally ended is hard to tell, but it is quite starkly obvious that after Lundy there haven't been any cases that spring to my mind where there were big unanswered questions or spectacular leaps from what was provable to what was prosecuted.
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Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I’m pretty sure 90’s Nokia/Ericsson phones usually had a computer interface that would have let you do just that. You could certainly text from your computer using the phones of that era.
Sure, but it's a whole new level to make a remote connection to said computer from another location, then initiate (and sustain) a telephone call. Dial-in capabilities are a bloody nuisance now, and worse if you're trying to organise it through (presumably) a motel's switchboard. No 3G data sticks, remember, and the remote connection software of the age was quite ghastly at the consumer level.
Lundy was never portrayed as any kind of computer genius, which at the time was what was required to make that kind of configuration function. He made a phone call, he didn't just send a text, and the technology of the day meant that was really only achievable by lashing phones together as seen in the worst kind of B-grade spy movie. -
Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to Ian Dalziel,
in light of the times given, perhaps there was a way to make the later call, without physically being there
Without a whole lot of quite complicated jiggery-pokery, it's bloody hard to do that now. Rewind to the start of last decade and it was also bloody hard to do as well as much less accessible to technical neophytes; a class to which, as best I can ascertain, Lundy firmly belonged.