KEY POINTS:
Prisons worldwide are full of clever, sophisticated criminals who bet against the sound common sense of a jury and lost.
Equally, judges and lawyers have been astonished at a jury's sweeping a defendant to freedom.
A careful, sometimes agonising jury-like process of coming to the right decision, and then celebrating it, sits at the centre of Ruatepupuke (Maori Television, 8.30pm tonight).
It revolves around a meeting house, bought in the late 19th century from the Tokomaru Bay Maori and shipped to England. It was then sold to a German. In 1905 it ended up at Chicago's Field Museum.
It is still there. Before the final decision was made on where it would remain forever, a long series of discussions went on, picking up all points of view. At the heart of the debate was, and is, the extraordinarily sensitive matter of the ownership of culture and cultural icons.
It was the stunningly successful Te Maori exhibition which pushed the meeting house front and centre.
One astute American conservator makes the point: "We had it [the meeting house] but we didn't know what to do with it, and that exhibition freed us from any suggestion we might even begin to know what to do with it."
That began a series of exchanges, including Maori craftsmen going to Chicago on an 18-month project to restore the shopworn wharenui. There was still a feeling the people of Tokomaru Bay should fight to have it returned. A woman in a separatist T-shirt is on camera catching the essence of this with her single sentence of diamond-bright clarity.
Once the Americans realised they weren't going into a fight over ownership and cultural issues, they leapt, as one man put it, "to do the right thing, because now we didn't have to worry about doing the wrong thing any more, which had been frightening for us".
That didn't end all the conflict, and the documentary gives us a too-short look at a hard little session with the museum staff and Maori sorting out protocols. In the end this documentary is not about conflict. Instead it is about celebration.
One person said, "It's now a place for Maori around the world ... to go and have a bit of time to connect with who they are, which is why we decided against getting it back."
Watch for Piripi Aspinall, an elder with a face made for television. And for the little American girl who won't quickly forget the moko'd lady who taught her the poi.
