KEY POINTS:
A passage in Louise Nicholas' book sticks in the mind. It was her reply to Phil Kitchin, the newspaper reporter who broke her story, when he asked her the question many who followed the trials this year are probably still asking.
Why didn't she resist? On all those visits the policemen made to her, why didn't she scream, fight, get help?
She said she was simply too scared and added: "You just go into ... You just fold into yourself when these things are happening. You are not even there. You just go away from your body. You are not even there."
Some criminal verdicts should be reported at every reference in their full legal precision: not guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Juries this year could not find the policemen "guilty beyond reasonable doubt".
Reasonable doubt is carefully explained to jurors by trial judges. It has to be a fairly objective doubt, as I recall, not imaginative or speculative. It should to be capable of being reasoned from the evidence.
Louise Nicholas could not have told her story in court exactly as she did in the book. A court does not encourage quiet, candid, reflective insights. From the witness box you hear nerves, caution, rehearsed answers, defensiveness.
Clint Rickards, not guilty beyond reasonable doubt, called her a liar again this week.
Either he or she has to have been lying; there is no middle ground unless you can believe three policemen having simultaneous sex with a cataleptic young woman could believe wrongly but honestly that she was enjoying it.
In a sympathetic interview on Radio Waatea, the man who was in line to be the first Maori commissioner of police also said, again, that he was not proud of what he did. Presumably he meant the group thing.
The still unexplained dimension of the saga that ended this year is the predilection of these policemen when younger to have sex in front of each other - a taste previously thought to be confined to leather gangs and the odd rugby league team.
Rickards' lawyer, John Haigh, said half the country was at it in the 1980s. I must be entirely acquainted with the other half.
But then, Louise Nicholas' story did encourage quite a number of women to approach the police's Operation Austin.
After Rickards' interview this week, Justice Lowell Goddard, the Independent Police Conduct Authority, reported the operation had received complaints involving 50 women, 25 of which warranted serious investigation.
Could Louise Nicholas be a liar, an attention-seeker or fantasist? If a woman was setting out to frame former sexual partners for treatment she only subsequently regretted, I think she would make up something more strenuous than: "You just go into ... You just fold into yourself when these things are happening. You are not even there. You just go away from your body. You are not even there."
The book contains a telling epilogue written by Dr Kim McGregor, director of Rape Prevention Education.
"For completely understandable reasons," writes Dr McGregor, "as many as half of all survivors of sexual violence never tell anyone about their experiences. Only about 10 in 100 report their experiences to police."
International statistics show that 80 per cent of those reported to police never proceed beyond the police investigation. Only six out of 100 cases reported produce a conviction. Reasonable doubt.
If the prey of powerful sexual predators retreats into herself, turns numb, cannot kick, scream, scratch or cry, is there a reasonable doubt?
The law seems as crude as the prosecuted cops on the subject of sex. It was unfair that Louise Nicholas' credibility could have been attacked in front of a jury that was not allowed to know that Rickards' two co-accused had been convicted for similar behaviour.
But time might prove she has achieved more by failing to convince a jury than she might have done with the dubious comfort of a conviction that Rickards' apologists might have tried to turn into a martyrdom.
As it is, the verdict has left in stark relief the cruelty of courtroom exposure and the deficiencies of legal procedure when it comes to discerning consent from compliance.
The law seems incapable of dealing with sexual assault unless it is witnessed by somebody not involved, or at least sufficiently guilt-ridden to testify.
But perhaps also the prison sentences are a little frightening for juries to convict in many cases.
It is hard to discuss any degree of cruelty with a sense of proportion. At the very least Louise Nicholas was treated abysmally by a succession of policemen but much worse can be imagined.
The constable who raped her at age 13 deserves to rot in a cell. Those who took advantage of her subsequent fear and silence, and of young women like her, may, indeed, be not guilty of rape beyond reasonable doubt but they deserved to be named and shamed for life. Maybe that is enough.
