KEY POINTS:
Wellington Lawyer Tony Ellis has a great sense of humour. This week (not on April Fool's Day) he announced his intention to represent a woman suing the Government for $600,000 because five years ago her "partner" committed suicide after being arrested for breaching a protection order she had taken out because he was so violent.
Susan Goodyer wants $250,000 for herself, $100,000 for one of her children and $50,000 for each of her other five kids. The latter are apparently entitled to less than their sibling because he witnessed Dad trying to hang himself in the Otaki police station.
It's not as if these kids have been deprived of a model father. Alan Hing, 36 when he took his life, was a Nomad gang member with a history of drunken violence. Goodyer had previously been beaten up by him, thus the protection order, which he ignored. So she called the police, who responded by locking him up in Manawatu Prison.
Hing allegedly told police if they put him in jail he would "end it all".
If I didn't have such a high regard for police, I'd suspect a threat like that, coming from a criminal whose own mother admitted he'd been a crook "from a young age", was just too tempting to ignore.
Hing's mother says the police "didn't do their job" and she supports the legal action because it might help "provide for" her son's partner and her children. I'd love to be proved wrong on this, but I suspect you and numerous other hardworking Kiwis have been "providing for" this family for some time.
And what sort of mother takes one of her children to the jail to visit a violent father threatening to commit suicide? Clearly a mother who recognises an alternative way to bolster her bank account rather than toiling for several years to get $600,000.
Ellis is suing the attorney-general on behalf of the Corrections Department, the police, Ministry of Health, Levin District Court, Palmerston North coroner, MidCentral District Health Board and the medical officer at Manawatu Prison, alleging they breached the Bill of Rights Act and international civil rights law. I'm surprised Ellis hasn't cited more defendants.
Why stop at only eight when he could have included Plunket for not correctly monitoring Hing as a baby, every school he attended for failing to ensure he didn't end up a bad boy, booze merchants for supplying the white man's fire water, maybe even God for not guiding this poor soul through a long and peaceful life?
Then again, Ellis could sue Hing's parents for raising someone who's wreaked misery and loss of property on scores of innocent citizens, Hing's partner for taking out a protection order then calling the cops when Hing breached it, Hing's fellow gang associates for enabling this low-life to terrorise Goodyer and her children.
But that wouldn't sound quite so much the cult of victimhood. We all know in these sensitive times people like Hing are never responsible for the bad karma which inevitably follows their lives.
You have to laugh really, lest you end up wailing and beating your head on the ground. Which is what Hing did when arrested. He rammed his head into cell walls and in the police van, and next morning smashed his head through a glass screen.
He was pepper-sprayed and police called an ambulance but Hing refused further treatment, including head x-rays, so when the cops dropped him off at jail they told prison staff he was a high suicide risk.
It's interesting Tony Ellis is described as a "civil rights" lawyer, a moniker he never corrects, presumably because it makes him sound so much more noble than his learned friends. Does this mean all other lawyers are not concerned with "civil rights"?
Thanks to a reasonably rational judiciary, we can expect this case will fail, but not before considerable taxpayers' dollars go into the plaintiff - if she's receiving legal aid - and the crown agencies being sued which have to put up a spirited defence.
Much rides on it. Ellis admits this is the first time such a Bill of Rights case has been taken in New Zealand. If he wins, the plug will well and truly come out of the Government's piggy bank, and the families of deceased criminals will form an unseemly queue at the door of Ellis' chambers.
Let's suppose Hing, instead of killing himself, had won Lotto's $19 million in jail, and taxpayers decided to sue for compensation, via the solicitor-general, for all the money forked out since he was, in his mother's words, a "small boy in and out of prison". Would Tony Ellis see that as a "civil rights" claim?
