Pair guilty of disabled woman's manslaughter

Here Teinakirai and Joseph Proude denied the manslaughter of Patricia Joseph. File photos / Brett Phibbs

The caregivers of an intellectually disabled woman have been found guilty of manslaughter by a High Court jury today.

The jury returned to the High Court at Auckland with its verdicts at 1.15pm after seven hours of deliberations.

Joseph Proude, 47, and Here Teinakirai, 53, were both accused of the manslaughter, through assault, of Patricia Joseph, 37, in January 2008.

Proude pleaded guilty to a separate charge of manslaughter, by denying her the necessaries of life and of disposing her body, and offering an indignity to human remains, in the Wairoa River. Teinakirai was today found guilty of that manslaughter charge and guilty of offering an indignity to human remains by disposing of the body.

Proude was also found guilty of five assault charges and Teinakirai guilty of 10 assault charges and one charge of injuring with intent.

Proude and Here Teinakirai both denied the charges.

The pair have been remanded in custody and will be sentenced on May 25.

Earlier, the Crown had argued Ms Joseph was assaulted about January 1, 2008 and left to die. Her body was dumped in the river on January 13 and found wrapped in pieces of cloth, weighed down with a rock and put into the river.

The jury of seven men and five women retired about 12.30pm yesterday after hearing Justice Pamela Andrews sum up the case.

Justice Andrews said that to find the pair guilty of the first manslaughter charge they had to find that they had committed an assault which caused Ms Joseph's death.

She said if jurors found them guilty of any of the assault charges, it was possible for jurors to consider this as evidence they had a tendency to commit assaults, such as one alleged to have caused Ms Joseph's death.

However, she even if they did decide the previous assaults happened, they couldn't jump from finding a propensity to assault to finding them guilty of manslaughter, without considering all other evidence of what happened in January 2008.

- with NZPA