KEY POINTS:
A supporter of David Bain says if he is released, he will struggle with parts of everyday life most people take for granted.
The Privy Council has quashed the 35-year-old's murder convictions and the Crown must now decide whether a retrial will be held. His lawyers are filing a bail application in the High Court at Christchurch tomorrow.
Waikanae woman Leila Read attended the privy council hearing. She says David Bain rang her over the weekend to thank her for her support.
Leila Read says Bain is excited about the possibility of getting back into the community but will have to learn new skills most people take for granted, such as using a credit card and managing a bank account.
Freed immediately
The man instrumental in Bain's successful Privy Council appeal says the 35-year-old should be freed immediately and not held while the Crown "dilly-dallies" over bail issues or decides on a retrial.
Joe Karam last night told the Herald the Crown "quite properly" had to address the issue of bail "according to the law", but Bain should not be the victim of "unjustified procrastination" on the part of prosecutors.
Bain - convicted for the 1994 murder of his parents and three siblings - had his convictions quashed on Thursday by the London-based Privy Council. The Law Lords ordered Bain be granted a retrial.
The ultimate decision on whether he will face a new trial rests with Solicitor-General David Collins, QC, who lost the Crown's case at the Privy Council in London.
Mr Karam told the Sunday Star-Times the Crown had "made a veiled allusion to the fact that David Bain's extended family are the victims and they may need to talk to them".
But he said yesterday that, as he understood it, the relatives were not victims in the sense meant in the Bail Act.
The act says the views of victims must be taken into account when considering granting a bail application.
Mr Karam said it could be up to six weeks before prosecutors decided whether to retry Bain, but it would be unfair if he was kept in prison in the interim.
"He really and truly wants to get out. He will be very disappointed if there's unnecessary delays or, as I put it, procrastination."
It is not known whether family members will oppose Bain's bail, but the family had already effectively disowned him, Mr Karam said.
"The family have made it very clear that they have absolutely wiped their hands of him."
Bain's relatives last year successfully prevented him from attending his grandmother's funeral. Mr Karam said Bain "would be happy to hold out the olive leaf" to his relatives, but an attempted reconciliation in 2003 had been ignored by the family.
A spokeswoman for Crown Law refused to discuss the pending bail hearing, or whether family members had been approached for their opinions on Bain's release.
Crown Law had yet to decide if it would oppose bail. The Bain family home was razed after the killings, the property sold and the proceeds - with other estate items - were "dispersed among the extended family", Mr Karam said.
Determining whether Bain could claim a piece of the estate now his convictions had been wiped would be "a complex question, even for an estate lawyer", he said.
- with NEWSTALK ZB
