WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
For a second day in a row, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield and police digital analyst Jun Lee were in a standoff.
Mansfield - representing eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne, now nearing the end of seventh week of his high-profile murder trial - tried to convince the witness that Pauline Hanna, 63, could have been using her iPhone around 4am on the morning she was found dead. Lee said it simply wasn’t possible.
Mansfield tried again. And again. He received the same response.
“I think I explained that numerous times,” Lee said at one point. “If someone was drafting a message at that time, there has to be a trace of at least that application getting opened.”
By the time lawyers had exhausted their questions of Lee early in the afternoon, the disagreement was no closer to resolution than it had been when Lee first entered the witness box two weeks ago.
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Polkinghorne, now 71, is accused of having fatally strangled his wife of 24 years before staging the scene at their Remuera home on April 5, 2021, to look like a suicide by hanging. Prosecutors have alleged he had been using some of the $13,000 worth of methamphetamine found inside the home when he lashed out at Hanna, possibly getting on her back and choking her as she slept in a separate bedroom.
Although the Crown is not required to establish a motive, much of the circumstantial case has focused on the surgeon’s extravagant spending on sex workers and his alleged “double life” with Sydney escort Madison Ashton, who exchanged intimate WhatsApp messages with him in the days following his wife’s death.
The defence, which has been calling witnesses for just over two weeks now, has insisted that Hanna killed herself just as the scene suggested. She had a long history of depression, an intensely stressful job that some witnesses have said she was struggling with and was taking what a psychiatrist has described as a dangerous combination of sleeping pills, weight loss drugs, anti-depressants and alcohol.
But the overall themes of the trial have been bogged down for the past two days as the defence has continued to intensely focus on the activity of Hanna’s phone between 4am and 4.05am on the morning of her death.
The defence has suggested that she was on the phone at that time and that she went into the messaging app, perhaps contemplating drafting a goodbye note before suicide. No messages were ever sent and no drafts were found on her phone, but phone logs show the phone twice running an “iMessage identity lookup” service at that time. The service looked up her husband’s phone and the phone of a friend’s teenage daughter - checking to see if they were also Apple devices, which would allow iMessages to be sent rather than standard texts.
The point of contention was whether Hanna had to be actively using the phone for the “iMessage identity lookup” to run or whether the identity check ran randomly in the background. Lee was adamant that both situations could apply generally, but on that morning all indications showed that the phone was in sleep mode and not being used. Mansfield disagreed.
And so they circled for hour after hour, remaining implacably opposed.
Lee added that it wasn’t just those two numbers being looked up by the phone around 4am. He showed jurors a video of him going into the phone’s downloaded logs on a computer. Although Polkinghorne’s phone number and the teen’s number were the ones initially listed, drilling down more into the data showed numerous other phone and email contacts, he said as he narrated the video from the witness box. It was another indication that it was a background function, he said.
Jurors took a late lunch break so that Mansfield could then recall his own expert: Atakan “Artie” Shahho, who has run an IT company out of Australia since 1988. Shahho first gave evidence on Tuesday but specifically avoided questions on the 4am matter so that the Crown expert could first finish his testimony on the subject.
Unlike Lee, Shahho told jurors he has been a registered Apple developer since 2008. He’s been an Apple aficionado since the company launched the first Mac desktop computer in 1984, he said.
“It’s a familiarity thing, Mr Mansfield,” the witness said when asked why being an Apple developer made him a better expert witness. “It’s in my DNA... You get to be very familiar with the back end.”
Shahho said he’d been researching the issue of the 4am logs since it came to light several weeks ago. He’s come to the conclusion, he said, that “a message was created but never sent”.
“The number would have been typed in and then it [the message] was abandoned,” he explained.
Shahho disagreed with Lee’s contention that it could have run in the background. Apple “got grilled by the European Union” a few years back for allegedly having access to people’s contacts and the company replied, “We don’t do that,” Shahho told jurors.
So the identity lookup, he surmised, “is user-initiated on the phone”.
Shahho is less than 30 minutes into today’s testimony and the Crown has not yet had a chance to cross-examine him on the issue.
He is expected to return to the witness box after jurors finish their late lunch break.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
The Herald will be covering the case in a daily podcast, Accused: The Polkinghorne Trial. You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, through The Front Page feed, or wherever you get your podcasts.
