Crusader for caring justice

Andrew Becroft

Kahu, handsome and muscular, is wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, sneakers. He's just turned 17. Last year, after an argument over a car, he delivered a punch; just one punch, but so powerful the victim needed six stitches.


Now, Kahu* is standing at the back of a courtroom while the lawyers, police, youth workers and judge talk about how he has agreed to apologise to his victim and atone for his acts in the hope of avoiding a criminal conviction - which he fears would ruin his dream of playing professional rugby league.

Kahu stands with hands clasped behind his back; glaring at the cops to his right, staring down at the table in front of him, turning around to grin at his mum.

Then the judge leans forward. Black robe, white shirt, pale striped tie, gold wedding ring, fair hair, greying a little. An hour ago, when he swept into court, Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft was smiling at everyone, chatty. Now, fixing his eyes on Kahu, he is seriously intimidating.

"Are you all talk?" Becroft demands. The boy blushes bright, begins to sweat, all his swagger gone. "Or are we going to see some changes, see you demonstrate a change of attitude? Because [otherwise] there would be absolutely no chance for you, and you would get a court order. The fact that your potential future professional rugby league career could be wrecked is not going to be enough. If you don't learn that fists don't solve anything - and fists endanger lives - if you don't learn that now, you never will. At the very least, I'm expecting 120 hours of community work, apology letters, alcohol counselling, reparation, consideration of a koha. So there are, in language you understand, some hard yards to be done. None of this buys you a clean record, it just gives you the right to argue for it."

This is the telling-off of Kahu's life, and his mum is nodding with approval and vindication, sitting behind her son along with uncle, auntie, league coach and the coach's wife.

As the whanau leaves court, with a date set in May to return for a progress report, each thanks and smiles at the judge. Even Kahu.

This mixture of kind and firm is Andrew Becroft's trademark. Outspoken, competitive, Christian and driven by his belief in equal access to justice, he is universally described as a "wonderful guy", even by the bureaucrats who would prefer judges to refrain from publicly expressing views on Government policy and spending priorities.

Now 48, Becroft grew up in Wellington and made his name as a defence lawyer in South Auckland, before becoming a District Court judge in 1996 and taking up the Youth Court role in 2001. As a young man, Becroft had such a severe stutter that a courtroom career seemed out of the question. On his first day of work at Queen St law firm Fortune Manning, Becroft couldn't even say his own surname on the phone to his first client, telling a caller 'My name's Andrew B-b-b ... " "Oh, you mean Mr Andrews?" said the caller. Becroft said yes, hung up and sprinted around to the receptionist. "I said, 'If someone calls for Mr Andrews, it's me'," he recalls. "I think the receptionist thought it was all very strange."

The firm paid for Becroft to attend a three-week Auckland Hospital stuttering programme where he was taught to pronounce words slowly and softly, breathing through the consonants rather than trying to force them out.

Friend and colleague Jonathan Moses, who played backyard cricket with Becroft as a child, recalls how as Auckland University law students they were both inspired by volunteering at at a free legal clinic in David Lange's Mangere electorate office, where the clients were predominantly poor, and 90 per cent Maori or Pacific Islanders. The community had few lawyers at the time - so in 1986 Becroft and Moses quit their city jobs to become the two founding solicitors of the Mangere Law Centre, a non-profit trust backed by Naomi Lange, along with many fellow young idealists, most of whom are now top lawyers and judges.

"We spent the first day laying the tiles on the floor," recalls Moses on the telephone from the Tanzanian city of Arusha, where he is prosecuting genocide cases at the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

"We'd been running the centre for a while, and had applied for a grant but hadn't heard anything, and just as we were literally spending our last dollars, this guy walked in. He looked really tough, like perhaps an ex-gang member, although that might be quite unfair to him. We barely looked twice, thinking 'oh yes, here's another client,' but he said 'I'm from the Community Organisation Grant Scheme, we've approved your grant, here's a cheque for $20,000.' That allowed us to keep going," Moses says.

"I think those years in South Auckland shaped Andrew, dealing as we were with people who haven't been dealt many picture-cards in life. He's experienced first-hand the fact that if people are given a chance, sometimes they will grab it with both hands and run with it."

Moses recalls watching with Becroft the movie My Cousin Vinny, in which an unlucky defendant finds himself represented in court by - of all people - a stuttering legal aid lawyer.

"We were on the floor of the picture theatre, rolling around with laughter. I was saying 'You should sue them for defamation, Beaks.' But I don't think the stutter has ever held him back. I remember one occasion when Andrew overheard a police officer saying 'Oh, the defence counsel is B-b-b-b-Becroft.' You can be sure Andrew's competitive nature meant he fought particularly hard for his client when cross-examining that policeman."

Defending drink-drivers became a significant part of the South Auckland work, says Becroft.

"One of the reasons for doing the work in Mangere was our thought 'why should a specialist defence only be available to those in parts of Auckland where money could buy that sort of defence?' Looking back on it, I'm not sure about the social utility of that particular service, but it was driven by a high view that the law should be equally accessible to both, even in the field of drunk-driving. That attracted a bit of criticism, but at least people who knew they might have a legitimate defence knew we were people who could actively present that defence."

He became a hero for many Maori with his 1997 District Court decision that Maori Kirk McRitchie had a customary right to catch trout to feed his iwi, without needing a licence. It was a controversial decision, later overturned by the Court of Appeal, but Auckland University dean of law Paul Rishworth says Becroft's decision was correct according to the legal situation at the time; the Government had legislated away Maori rights to fish native species with the 1992 Sealord Settlement Act, but had not defined the status of trout, an introduced fish.

"The Court of Appeal accepted that very specific rules had always existed in relation to trout since they were introduced to New Zealand waters, but to me Andrew's decision was quite right as a judge in his position of first instance," says Rishworth.

Becroft believes there is brilliance within New Zealand's world-leading restorative youth justice system, but wants to see more resources and time spent on making key elements work better, like the family group conferences where offenders, victims and police try to reach consensus on an out-of-court resolution which might include apologies, reparation - even creative solutions having a young shoplifter perform community work as a shop assistant in the dairy she robbed.

Becroft is irritated by headlines which suggest youth crime is booming. He says youth offending has been a stable 22 per cent of total offending over the past 10 years. The Youth Court only sees the most serious offenders; the 15-20 per cent of cases which are not resolved with a police caution or diversionary programme. These are New Zealand's most difficult young people; 85 per cent are male, up to 80 per cent have drug or alcohol problems, 70 per cent do not show up to school or aren't enrolled, and at least 50 per cent are Maori. Within that group, however, serious assaults and other top-end violence are increasing - although it is too early to call this a definite upward trend.

Becroft sees youth justice as a societal problem, not just one for the courts; he believes part of the solution is helping families understand the importance of attending school, participating in sport and choosing the right friends. "In New Zealand we have been very strong in our development of a restorative process that holds young people to account, but my criticism is that we haven't been as committed as we should have been to preventing re-offending," he says.

That requires more money and resources for social workers and youth justice co-ordinators (the CYFS officers who run family group conferences), drug and alcohol treatment, early identification and help for struggling families, Becroft says.

He's also in favour of broader approaches like "multi-systemic family therapy", where psychologists and social workers work with all an offender's family on problems which might be contributing to crime. This family-wide approach has been shown in United States research to cut reoffending to about 46 per cent of those who have committed serious crime, Becroft says - a world-beating level of success.

By comparison, in New Zealand 30 per cent of young people who go through the Family Group Conference process do not re-offend, and a further 25 per cent commit far less serious offences.

"Family Group Conferences are often criticised as weak, liberal, Kumbaya singing, a slap over-the-hand with a wet bus-ticket, but that's an absurd criticism because it is an idea with the seeds of genius in it. It's not a soft system, it's not a cop-out. It's great for the victims, because they begin to see that the monster who burgled their house is a rather shy, uncertain 15-year-old with a constellation of human problems. For the offender, confronting the human dimension of their offending is a very powerful tool, and all of them say it's a lot tougher than court."

Becroft's defence background makes him particularly quick to "cut through the nonsense" as a judge, says James Johnston, a partner at Wellington firm Rainey Collins.

"He's heard all the excuses and that means the lawyers and the young people aren't going to get away with anything," Johnston says. He recalls one young client - a girl who had committed acts of serious violence - who was "on her way to Arohata" [women's prison] until the Youth Court process. With the help of Becroft, social workers and others, she was able to meet and reconcile with her victims and start afresh with long-lost family members who were prepared to take her in.

"At the end of it all she said to him 'Judge, can I shake your hand?' and of course he said yes," Johnston says. "I am 100 per cent confident that she will never reoffend. That case showed that family group conferences, when they are properly resourced, really work for the victim, the offender and society."

Becroft won't comment on any ambitions for the future but is seen as a candidate for higher judicial rank.

Becroft says he and wife Philippa, also a lawyer, are yet to experience the turbulent "white-water rafting" years of adolescence with their own children, aged 10, 9 and 5.

"It's right to emphasise the challenges of this generation, such as P and other drugs, the rise in single parent families, but it's wrong to think that only this generation has had problems with young people. Young people are by definition problems, because they are experimental, challenging, boundary-pushers," Becroft says.

"They do reckless things, and make extremely poor decisions. But there's also idealism, ideas, the hope for the next generation. For example, the boy who founded Trade Me [Sam Morgan] - out of that maelstrom of developmental transition from youth to mature adulthood comes great creativity and the energy for the next generation."

*Kahu's name has been changed to protect his identity, as required for all Youth Court proceedings.