Evidence Bill hits spouse-beaters

Men or women who beat their partners will find it much harder to escape prosecution under a proposed law that would accept victims' statements to police as evidence, even if they later changed their minds.

Chief District Court Judge Russell Johnson told a conference in Auckland yesterday that the Evidence Bill, expected to be passed next year, would reinforce court reforms aimed at resolving domestic violence cases quickly rather than trapping victims in a "deadly dance" of legal delays.

The bill would abolish a time-honoured law that people cannot be compelled to give evidence against their spouses, a law dating from the tradition that a married woman had no separate legal identity from her husband.

If a woman is forced to give evidence, and tells the court a different story from what she told police originally, the bill would also allow the judge to accept her original statement to police as contrary evidence.

Judges would still have a discretion to exempt a victim from giving evidence in court if that would cause "hardship", but they could then still convict on the basis of the victim's statement to police.

An Auckland University law lecturer, Scott Optican, said the changes would make it much easier for police to win cases in which the victim became too scared to continue.

"If she says something different or says nothing happened, the prosecution can bring in her prior written statements and those statements can now be admissible in evidence."

Judge Johnson said the courts had struggled to cope with domestic violence cases "ever since the police began to intervene in family disputes, which dates back now to about 1992".

"Family violence has aspects which no other crime does," he said.

"The complainant and the defendant are in the same household and the opportunities for interfering with the process of justice are huge. There is emotional and financial interdependence between the parties.

"Mostly they need to get their problem resolved so they can move on. But the court process has tended to trap them in a deadly dance by suspending time and denying people the chance to heal themselves.

"Something has to give, and it tends to be first the victims of violence and then the process of justice.

"You don't have to be in the game long to know that unless a family violence case is heard within about six weeks, you haven't got a case, because for one reason or another you haven't got evidence.

"The complainant can't sustain the delay. Life has to move on, and the offender wins."

When this happened, he said, "second time around the offence will be worse, the violence more dangerous, because the offender has learned from the first experience with the court that the law is impotent".

"In reality, the process of justice exaggerates the problem by being unable to hold the offender accountable."

Judge Johnson said a new "fast-track" process was now being followed in special family violence courts in Waitakere and Manukau.

The Manukau experiment had led to more guilty pleas and fewer "no-shows" in court.

"Far more often than ever before, the victims are turning up also, [enabling] a consultative process to go on."

He hoped to extend the system soon to other high-volume courts such as Auckland and Rotorua.