Perjury penalties 'too soft'

Greg Newbold

More prosecutions and tougher penalties for perjury would help reduce the incidence of miscarriages of justice, a seminar at Auckland University was told yesterday.

On many occasions the judiciary did not take perjury, or evidence tampering seriously enough, associate sociology professor Greg Newbold told a seminar organised by the Legal Research Foundation to discuss a report by retired High Court judge Sir Thomas Thorp.

Sir Thomas, who made a two-year study of the topic, advocates that an adequately-resourced independent authority with an investigative capacity be set up to look into claims of miscarriages, which he believes are under-estimated.

Professor Newbold supported such an authority but also wanted a tougher, deterrent approach to perjury. Police figures showed that in up to 30 per cent of sex abuse cases, officers were not convinced that an offence had occurred.

He believed penalties imposed for perjury - which carries a maximum 14 years imprisonment - were too soft, and gave the example of a Waikato University student falsely accused of rape in 1995.

The student's name was splashed in the media, he was hounded out of university and faced, had he been convicted, an eight-year prison term, whereas on conviction for perjury his accuser "got off with 150 hours' community work and reparation, and the court awarded her name suppression".

Professor Newbold, one of 10 speakers, entitled his address Stories From Prison. He served a prison sentence for drugs in the 1970s before becoming a criminologist and witnessed the confusion and distress of Arthur Allan Thomas, convicted of the Crewe murders but later pardoned.

"To his great bewilderment, he found that the criminal justice system doesn't always work in the way it's supposed to."

Professor Newbold nominated the case of Teina Pora, convicted of the murder of Susan Burdett in Auckland in 1992, as "particularly disturbing". Convicted serial rapist Malcolm Rewa was acquitted of murdering Ms Burdett though DNA showed he had raped Burdett about the time she was killed. No evidence was produced that Pora and Rewa ever knew each other, Professor Newbold said.

While not all cases were so serious, the same process applied, he said. Following the Springbok tour of 1981, Professor Newbold watched five men convicted of crimes they denied and which he knew they had not committed - "because the person who committed them was me".

He said there was a "culture" in the Auckland police in the 1970s of fabricating or manipulating evidence, including the practice of "verballing" whereby police manufactured false confessions. This was not such an issue now due to videotaping interviews with suspects.

He believed the use of "jailhouse informants" or "narks" posed a great risk of miscarriages today. "Typically, narks are repeat offenders and social misfits who act out of self interest and without any concern for higher principles.

"There is a clear need ... for judges to issue the sternest of warnings to juries about the dangers of evidence of this type."

Ricardo Sannd, who was on witness protection when he stole the Tissot painting in 1998 and Travis Burns, convicted of beating Whangaparaoa housewife Joanne McCarthy to death, have been used as jailhouse witnesses.

Most in the audience of 200 were lawyers. Others included Chris Watson, father of convicted Marlborough Sounds double-murderer Scott Watson, and David Bain campaigner Joe Karam.


Bad justice: the causes

Apart from perjury and evidence-tampering, speakers identified these factors in miscarriages of justice:

* Racial and cultural prejudice. A paper introduced by Manukau Urban Maori Authority chief executive June Jackson said the most common answer from Maori about their low rate of appealing was that they felt there was no point. "Their attitude is that the Court of Appeal is the last leg in a system in which they have no chance of succeeding."

* Misinterpretation or statistical exaggeration of forensic evidence.

* Eyewitness misidentification, flawed disclosure, false complaints and confessions, police "tunnel vision", pressure from public, media and victims.