This year marked the beginning of NZME’s groundbreaking Open Justice project, featuring a dedicated team of 13 reporters covering courts and tribunals across the country.
Upwards of 1700 articles were written over the course of the year, covering everything from low-level and sometimes quirky offending through to serial rapists, murderers and abusers. Ethan Griffiths looks back on some of the bigger cases that made headlines in 2022.
The botched sentencing of Jayden Meyer
The prosecution of 18-year-old Tauranga man Jayden Meyer sparked one of the most furious public responses to any case in New Zealand’s courts this year, with hundreds of people marching in the street and thousands signing a petition questioning how the case was handled.
It began on September 6 when Open Justice published a story revealing the prosecution against Meyer for the rapes of four 15-year-old girls and the sexual violation of another. One of the rapes occurred in a bush, while another was filmed by Meyer in its entirety.
From a starting point of six years imprisonment, he was sentenced to nine months home detention, unusually supported by the Crown. In the days after the story was published, social media erupted with anger, while a petition calling for the sentence to be appealed garnered nearly 40,000 signatures. A protest in Tauranga saw 600 local students “march for justice”.
The victims of Meyer’s offending later penned an article for Open Justice, speaking about their hurt at what they felt was an unjust sentence.
The reason for Meyer’s sentence wasn’t detailed by the sentencing judge, Christopher Harding, in his written decision. Another local judge accused journalists of “creating an entirely unnecessary public furore” in the way they reported on the case, and denied media the right to access documents that would reveal how the sentence was reached.
Crown Law, the agency with oversight over Crown solicitors, went about launching an appeal against the sentence that was heard six weeks later.
Deputy solicitor-general Madeleine Laracy denied the appeal was sparked by media coverage and public outrage.
Ultimately, it wasn’t successful, with the High Court finding that while the sentence was “manifestly inadequate”, the fact Meyer had partially completed his sentence meant it would be unjust to turn around and change it.
The High Court also slated the lack of transparency of the sentencing process at the District Court level.
The cult killing
Palmerston North woman Ellen Craig was right under the police’s nose.
In 1987, 2-year-old Tillie Craig went missing from the Ministry of God commune, inland from Sydney. But the disappearance was never reported until a witness came forward in 2019.
Australian police now allege Ellen Craig beat her daughter with a plastic pipe after becoming angry, killing her in the process. Tillie’s body was then allegedly burnt by Craig and Alexander Wilon, who ran the sect under the name Alfio Nicolosi.
After the alleged murder, Craig was expelled from the cult and moved home to New Zealand where she used the name Jowelle Smith for three years, before changing it again and going on to manage the Palmerston North Women’s Refuge under the name “Erena Craig”. Her role required her to engage with police.
Last November, Craig was in her Kainga Ora home when the authorities finally came knocking, after a years-long joint investigation by New South Wales and New Zealand police. She was arrested, as was Wilon who was found in Sydney.
The process to extradite Craig then began, where she appeared in court multiple times fighting the request to send her to Australia. However, Judge Ian Carter granted the extradition order in March, with Craig landing on Aussie soil later in May. She will face trial next year.
The killing of Malachi Subecz
“I constantly see Malachi wired up and gasping for breath. The images have never gone away, and probably never will.”
Those were the words of 5-year-old Malachi Subecz’s uncle Peter Menzies, who sat with the little boy as he took his last breath at Starship children’s hospital in November last year.
One of the most high-profile murder prosecutions of the year, the brutal abuse and eventual killing of the Te Puna boy will forever be etched in the minds of those who work with children.
The horrifying case saw Malachi placed in the care of Michaela Barriball, a friend of Malachi’s mother who at that point was in prison and unable to care for her son.
While in Barriball’s care, Malachi suffered repeated beatings, was held under bath water, locked in a car and thrown against walls by his hair. Food was withheld from him, and he was forced to stand for prolonged periods while his carer sat and watched movies.
The abuse eventually culminated in a wretched attack on the child on the morning of November 1, as Barriball received news she had been denied a rental. She inflicted blunt force trauma on the child and he suffered a seizure. He was later rushed to Starship, succumbing to his injuries 12 days later.
At one point, a member of Malachi’s whānau contacted Oranga Tamariki with their concerns, but the government agency failed to act.
On June 30, Barriball was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non–parole period of 17 years – one of the longest ever passed down to a female offender.
Tauranga Boys College apologises
Following apologies from Dilworth School and St Peter’s School in Cambridge, Hawkes Bay man Glenn Marshall felt he deserved one too.
Marshall attended Tauranga Boys College in 1988, where he was asked by now-deceased English teacher Pinky Green if he would allow himself to be tied to a chair naked and perform bondage.
Marshall approached Tauranga Boys’ late last year asking for a public apology because he believed reputational damage to the school was prioritised over the wellbeing of students at the time.
The school reinvestigated the case and initially told Marshall there was no evidence it was “swept under the carpet” at the time and the Board of Trustees did not support a public apology. Marshall later complained to police, the Ombudsman and the Minister of Education.
After questions from Open Justice, the school changed its position and offered a public apology from Board of Trustees chairperson Nikki Iuli, who said sorry for the historic incidents and acknowledged the review of Marshall’s complaint was “insufficient”.
“While nothing we do as a school can erase history, we want to do what we can to help those still living and suffering from any long-term effects of past abuses.”
Our first convicted saboteur
Taupō man Graham Philip wasn’t always on a path to criminality. A 62-year-old with a loving wife, three children and stable employment, three years ago it would have seemed unfathomable that this man would eventually become the country’s first saboteur.
But after a trip down the rabbit hole, Philip became so firm in his convictions - namely a catalogue of conspiracies surrounding Covid-19 - that he undertook an attack against vital Transpower infrastructure in an effort to bring attention to his cause.
It’s illegal to detail precisely what Philip attacked, what he used, or what the consequences of his attack could have been. While he caused $1.25 million in damage which led to a fire, further details remain subject to a permanent suppression order over Crown fears of copycat offenders.
Open Justice first revealed the case in June, with very limited details. As the months passed, the case drew significant attention within online Covid-19 conspiracy circles, with many claiming he was a “political prisoner” held without charge.
Philip’s wife Marta seized upon that disinformation, embracing the flatly false rumours as she became his chief public advocate, posting videos to Facebook and talking of how her husband was an innocent “family man”.
After telling supporters he would never back down, with Marta soliciting multiple donations from supporters for his legal fees, Philip ended up pleading guilty to the seven charges - a decision he later claimed he was coerced into, before backtracking on that suggestion too.
He was sentenced to three years and one month imprisonment.
The consent defence
A judge, three jurors and a court registrar all fought back tears as Samoan national Tulisi Leiataua was found guilty of 33 charges of sexual abuse against two young girls in July.
But for some, it was the man’s defence that was the most horrifying aspect of the ordeal, with his lawyer Panama Le’au’anae putting it to a woman who was abused at just 12 years old that she consented to sex with the man.
“You were scared because you didn’t want anyone to know you were having consensual sexual intercourse with an older man. The only reason you reported this was because you were forced to, you felt ashamed and regretful, this is the truth isn’t it,” Le’au’anae asked the woman.
“This man made me feel like I was a dog ... what he did to me was never consensual,” she replied as tears ran down her cheeks.
The case was a drawn-out one. The two young girls were abused over a prolonged period beginning in 2010. They made complaints to police six months after Leiataua returned to Samoa in May 2014, but it took until 2020 for a Samoan judge to order his extradition.
And as New Zealand’s law is written, the trial allowed Leiataua’s lawyer to use consent as a defence - even if the victim was below the statutory age of consent.
Kathryn McPhillips, the executive director of sexual harm support service Help Auckland said it was deeply concerning the law allowed these types of defences.
“Everybody assumes that 16 is the age of consent in New Zealand ... but if the charge is sexual violation there’s no age on that ... it’s absolutely outrageous.”
The case struck a chord with 17-year-old Youth MP Layba Zubair, who this year petitioned Parliament and began an Instagram campaign for consent law reform.
“The most significant thing I want out of this is, at the minimum, a definition for what consent is. Because our laws tell us when consent isn’t given, but it doesn’t tell you when consent is given. You cannot afford to assume consent.”
Justice Minister Kiri Allan told NZME in August that she was looking into legislation surrounding consent.
“I am particularly concerned about young victims of sexual violence and their experience in the justice system,” she said.
“I have already sought advice on these matters and will be actively considering what next steps to take.”
