KEY POINTS:
Management at Rimutaka Prison has been strongly criticised for its unfair and possibly biased handling of a case that ended with a prison officer being sacked.
Employment Court Judge Coral Shaw ruled that the department had wrongly dismissed Rakai Tawhiwhirangi, a corrections officer for 21 years, for serious misconduct over an incident at the prison in February last year.
A prisoner had come into Mr Tawhiwhirangi's office and asked him to smuggle drugs and a cellphone into the prison. Mr Tawhiwhirangi refused and marched the prisoner out of the office.
The department argued that Mr Tawhiwhirangi had struck the prisoner as they entered the corridor, and again when they were in the corridor. Mr Tawhiwhirangi said he had placed a hand on the prisoner's shoulder to guide him back to the cells.
Prison officer William Collins came into the corridor and said he saw the prisoner threaten and verbally abuse Mr Tawhiwhirangi.
The prisoner was then forced to the ground.
In her decision Judge Shaw said the evidence against Mr Tawhiwhirangi was inadequate and video footage of the incident - filmed with no sound and at three frames a second - potentially supported both accounts.
But she said the way the investigation was carried out "strongly suggests that the investigators formed a fixed and unchangeable view of what had happened even though the [video] footage was not conclusive".
"They were plainly very anxious to ensure that their interpretation of what happened could be verified by the footage."
She found:
* Unit manager David Kilbride, who conducted the employment investigation, had carefully gone through the footage with the prisoner and described all points of view, something he did not do with Mr Tawhiwhirangi.
* Then-regional manager Dave East, who made the decision to sack Mr Tawhiwhirangi, took Mr Kilbride's findings as gospel and dismissed other points of view, however plausible.
* Mr East refused to interview the only eye-witness, Mr Collins, because he thought Mr Collins was not credible and had retracted an earlier statement.
He based this refusal on a second-hand conversation with an unauthorised union official, with whom the department had been warned not to discuss the case.
"Mr Kilbride decided that Mr Collins' evidence was irrelevant ... As the only eyewitness account, it was plainly very relevant," Judge Shaw said.
"Mr East's approach to Mr Collins' evidence ... leads me to the conclusion that he did not approach this investigation in a totally unbiased or independent way.
"It is remarkable that Mr East did not interview [Mr Collins] in person to verify [whether he had retracted the statement], particularly when he was given sworn evidence from Mr Collins denying this."
Mr East is currently suspended for alleged incompetence.
Furthermore, Judge Shaw said even if the prisoner was slapped twice on his neck, "neither of which caused any injury or even prompted a complaint by the prisoner", it would not have amounted to serious misconduct.
The department also failed to investigate whether Mr Tawhiwhirangi's use of force could have been justifiable.
