KEY POINTS:
Students who former Glenfield College teacher Heremia Smith allegedly indecently assaulted had such respect for him they called him by the title "Matua", the Auckland District Court heard yesterday.
Crown lawyer Anna Pollett said in closing that the 30-year-old, one-time head of Maori studies at the school was seen as a teacher, coach and mentor, but breached that environment of trust "sometimes blatantly, sometimes in a more subtle way".
Smith is facing 11 charges of indecent assault involving a girl aged between 12 and 16, a sexual violation charge and two charges of sexual conduct with a young person aged under 16.
They related to alleged offending between 2002 and 2005.
Six of the seven complainants were students at Glenfield College on Auckland's North Shore. The seventh - to whom the most serious charge related - was treated by Smith as a "niece".
The jury retired to consider its decision yesterday afternoon.
Ms Pollett had told the court Smith was an authority figure, who built relationships with the complainants at school and outside school hours, coaching sport and taking a leading role with the school's kapa haka.
"They called him 'Matua', a Maori custom that the accused himself had passed on to them," she told the jury of six men and six women.
Ms Pollett said Smith's actions had made the complainants feel scared, uncomfortable, weird, strange and confused.
"Things weren't right, they were wrong," she said.
Defence lawyer Gary Gotlieb said Smith was in a vulnerable position with students on "hundreds and hundreds" of occasions as a male teacher of Maori and sports.
"Is it strange that these girls [the complainants] are by and large a group?" he said.
Mr Gotlieb said in closing the nine-day trial before Judge Josephine Bouchier that it was a "he said, she said" case in which the onus of proof was on the Crown.
"These types of charges are the hardest to defend."
The complainant in the earliest allegation - who cannot legally be identified - had dysfunctional relationships in her family and her mother had previously knocked her unconscious.
Mr Gotlieb suggested the woman - at the time, a Glenfield College student aged 14 or 15 - may have made up a story to divert her mother's anger when she was late home from school.
The woman earlier said in evidence that Smith, with whom she spoke about her problems with family and friends, had given her a ride home from school but when they stopped outside her house, told her to put her seat back and pull up her top.
She said she didn't and ran inside.
She told the court she had gone to see Smith in his office the next day, straddled him as he sat in a chair then pulled up her own top.
She claimed he asked her "will you go down on me now?" and touched her breasts for about five minutes.
Ms Pollett said the woman would have likely told a more exaggerated story if she was making it up and questioned if the student would have said she lifted her own top.
Mr Gotlieb said Smith denied it had happened and said the teacher claimed he had never touched the student's breasts.
The most serious allegation related to a claim that Smith put his penis in the mouth of a sleeping 13-year-old girl he was sharing a bed with in July 2004.
Smith did not dispute he shared a bed with the girl but Mr Gotlieb said his client denied the accusation of oral sex and suggested Smith had done nothing improper and there was no cause for concern.
He said it was "human instinct" to run away from danger and the teenager had not gone to lie down with her parents, who were staying in the lounge.
"If you are scared you run away, you don't go back."
The defence argued that the alleged incidents either did not happen or - in two instances - did happen, but were not indecent.
Mr Gotlieb said the two instances related to a time when Smith massaged two injured female students in the school's physiotherapy room so they could play an arranged sports game later that day.
