2004 for New Zealanders: Simon Moore

Simon Moore

"Well, it's been a biggy," says Simon Moore, Crown Solicitor, although every year is, he points out - for everyone.

It is just that the Crown Solicitor's years are measured in ways that most people's are not: by the results of the worst criminal court cases.

This is a funny way to measure time, he agrees. "It is strange because you look at the year in terms of cases you've completed."

Last Christmas he had just finished prosecuting the killers of pizza bar worker Marcus Doig and bank teller John Vaughan. "So that was a biggy. And it's a lot more than just a lot of work pulling together a trial like that. It's also some of the more emotional aspects. You can't leave a trial of that size without realising ... that there are two families who, you know, whose Christmases will never be the same."

But 2004 has been the year of Pitcairn. Which has meant, for Moore, that the public and media spotlight has been on him even more than in most years.

"Pitcairn," he says, "certainly was attractive because it's such an interesting story." Certainly from "the outside looking in, I have to say, the year has been dominated by Pitcairn". It was the isolation of the place, and the close-knit community, ties between the accused and the defendants that meant that the Pitcairn cases were so much in the spotlight.

"It was that aspect that made what, in fact, were a series of pretty unremarkable sexual cases, in the kind of context we're routinely involved in, so interesting. I mean, these cases, not one of them would be a case which would attract any media attention at all, if it was anything other than Pitcairn."

Attract attention it did, which certainly added to the dubious charms of prosecuting cases on the island. "We had to live in this place under a glare of publicity in an environment where it didn't matter where you moved or where you went to, you bumped into people [involved in the case]. We lived right next door to the [accused] mayor, Steve Christian. That was stressful for him and it was stressful for us."

Moore and his fellow prosecutors were on the island for over five weeks - and there was no prospect of getting off for the odd weekend. "When you went home at the end of a working day you were still in the same place that you would start your working day in. You had to be discreet and you had to be careful."

The aspect which made Pitcairn particularly challenging "is that we knew we were heading over there for a period which, at the very least, would be measured for about a couple of months. So you have to think ahead in a way that is really quite unusual for any lawyer. You know, normally when you start a case, you're not thinking about the number of underpants that you need."

There were trials alongside the trials, and obvious tribulations, but Moore, a jolly good storyteller, will be dining out - discreetly, of course - on this one for years.

Whatever cases come up in the new year, it is unlikely that they will provide such a feast (if that is the right word) of toilet stories. The Crown Prosecutor was, and remains, much tickled by the fact that "going to the loo in Pitcairn was extremely interesting because the public lavatories have back editions of the New Zealand telephone directories. The one behind the courtroom had the Gisborne directory and I thoroughly enjoyed checking out that directory [because] my relatives in Gisborne start with W. We never got to them. But certain other people in Gisborne I know whose names are further up the alphabet disappeared during the course of the trial."

In February, Moore will be back in court, beginning a new working year which will no doubt be measured in odd ways. Although probably never again by the using up of old phone books.