The Crown finally accepts that the 1986 murder conviction of Alan Hall was “a substantial miscarriage of justice”. Phil Taylor, who first wrote about the case in 2011, asks why it has taken so long.
Crown submissions filed in April in the Supreme Court case of Alan Russell Hall v The Queen make such extraordinary reading that Hall's lawyer nearly fell out of his chair. It is "unassailable" and "incontrovertible" that "key evidence was materially altered" and "relevant evidence was concealed", they say.
These are not defence assertions but acknowledgments by Crown Law, the government department that oversees criminal prosecutions, of a case gone badly wrong.
Whether this was due to misconduct or something else entirely remains to be seen, but the Crown has acknowledged it is "regrettable" and "will likely cast a long shadow".
In its submissions, Crown Law accepts that Hall's convictions should be quashed and says it will not seek a retrial. The court this month granted the special leave required to appeal in a case so old, and Hall's convictions are expected to be formally quashed after a hearing on June 8.
At long last. The Crown's reversal came 13,350 days after Auckland man Arthur Easton was murdered in a random home invasion. Hall has appealed five times and spent almost 19 years in prison.
Hall has always insisted he is innocent, claiming that evidence was manipulated to fit him up and information helpful to him was hidden. His mother, Shirley, who sold the family home to pay legal bills, fought for her son until her last breath. She died in 2012 but her influence lives on.
"You know," says Hall's brother, Geoff, "I think Mum was up there guiding us." It should have been a time for celebration, to break open the bubbles, but the mood was subdued. "What an absolute waste of Alan's life."
Hall's lawyer, Nick Chisnall, a former Crown counsel, put his finger on what is so frustrating. "My overall feeling," he told the Listener, "is how hard it is to get a case over the line where a miscarriage of justice is so obvious."
Perhaps hardest for Hall and his family to stomach is the Crown now points to information it has known for 29 years as the strongest argument for a wrongful conviction. This relates to tampering with the evidence of a key prosecution witness. It also now accepts that evidence helpful to Hall was withheld, and that his 2019 autism spectrum disorder diagnosis may mean statements he made to police were unfairly obtained.
The essential facts are these. On the evening of October 13, 1985, Arthur Easton, 52, and his teenage sons Kim and Brendan – all six-footers – fought an intruder armed with a bayonet in the hallway of their Papakura home. During the brawl, the intruder was punched in the genitals and hit over the head multiple times with a squash racquet. All three Eastons were injured; Arthur died soon after an ambulance arrived.
The intruder managed to fend the Eastons off, open a door and escape through a hedge, then along an access way. While he was momentarily trapped in the doorway, the woollen beanie he was wearing came off. The bayonet was left behind. Blue fibres were found on the hedge.
Hall came to police attention two months later via neighbourhood canvassing, and became the new prime suspect when he acknowledged he'd had a bayonet and beanie that matched those left at the scene.
The Crown's case hinged on Hall, who had no alibi, lacking credibility. He gave differing explanations for why the items were no longer in his possession. This was seen as an indication of guilt.
Hall, who was described as "backward intellectually" and "simple" at the time, and has since been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, was detained for questioning for a total of 23 hours. The Crown now accepts there is "a reasonable foundation for the argument that [his] statements were unfairly obtained".
While the presence of Hall's beanie and bayonet at the scene was strong evidence, it didn't in itself mean he was there, and he was adamant he was not. The family says the hat, bayonet and other items were stolen from the sleepout Hall shared with one of his brothers. He wasn't identified by the Easton brothers, his fingerprints were not found at the scene and no sightings matched his description. Nor did his work colleagues notice any injuries.
It is the steps taken in trying to prove Hall was the intruder that have caused the case to unravel. Identification was the central issue. Indications that night and the next morning from the two teenagers were that the intruder was about their height, powerfully built, Māori and wielded the bayonet in his right hand.
Hall, who was arrested two months later, is Pākehā, 1.72m, left-handed and asthmatic. At the time, he was of slim build and weighed 68kg.
After he became the prime suspect, police held a reconstruction of the struggle. Subsequently, the brothers thought the intruder could have been smaller and left-handed. The opinion of Hall's supporters – that this was an attempt to dilute the brothers' earlier descriptions – appears to have been shared by one or some of the officers working on the case, according to an unsigned note written on a police job sheet sent to the defence. It reads in part: "[Brendan Easton] originally said the knife was in the intruders [sic] right hand but after reconstruction with C.I.B. thought it was logical that the knife was in intruders [sic] left hand. After 2 to 3 hours brainwashing. Now he believes it."
A shocking example of manipulation of evidence involved a key eyewitness. According to the Crown case, a passing motorist, Ronald Turner, saw the intruder fleeing. The trial judge thought Turner's statement sufficiently important to read it in full to the jury. What the judge, jury, defence and Turner himself did not know was Turner's description of the man he saw as being Māori had been removed, and information damaging to Hall was added.
After hearing a radio report about the murder, Turner had phoned the police and reported seeing a male Māori running from the direction of the Easton home. He repeated the description of the man's ethnicity the next day and again months later (after Hall became the prime suspect), when police specifically questioned that aspect of his evidence. Those statements were not disclosed and the Crown chose not to call Turner to give evidence in person.
The changes to his account came to light two years after the trial. In his subsequent affidavit, Turner said: "I am extremely surprised at this omission, not apparent to me before, particularly after the Police Sergeant had tested me at length on this very point, and made an issue of it. I still believe that the person I saw that night was a Māori person and that would have been my evidence if called to court."
Turner noticed something else was wrong. His statement used in court indicated he had identified a blue sweatshirt police seized from Hall as matching the top worn by the man he saw. He stated he was not shown any clothing "and so could not identify any exhibit as being worn by the Māori man I saw that night".
The prejudicial impact of that apparent addition was negated by a receipt showing Hall's sweatshirt was bought after the date of the murder. Tim McKinnel, a private investigator who, along with his assistant Katya Paquin, worked on Hall's latest appeal, says the changes show "evidence that was inaccurate was intentionally placed before the jury".
By the time this was discovered, Hall had lost his appeal and the first of three applications for the royal prerogative of mercy had been rejected. The Crown now says it was "wrong" to deny Hall's second and third bids.
That's cold comfort to the Hall family. The evidence about Turner's doctored statements has been in the Crown files since 1993. The media raised concerns through the following decades, and the changes to Turner's statement were the focus of my own reporting in the NZ Herald a decade ago and again in Mike Wesley-Smith's 2018 podcast Grove Road.
The podcast reinvigorated efforts to clear Hall's name and led to the involvement of McKinnel, who successfully campaigned to overturn Teina Pora's conviction for the 1992 rape and murder of Susan Burdett.
The police officer in charge of the Easton murder investigation told Wesley-Smith the prosecutor was responsible for the decision to remove "Māori" from Turner's statement, an assertion the prosecutor categorically denied.
The senior officer said the description was removed because it was considered unreliable in view of "the man having his hood on, the fleeting nature of the contact, [the witness'] inability to describe facial features, the darkness of the right of way and the suspect sighting experiment", which apparently involved officers running across the road in front of another officer.
University of Auckland associate law professor Scott Optican, a former prosecutor and a specialist in criminal procedure, says it is not for the police or prosecutor to decide what evidence is reliable or relevant. "In essence, you are setting yourself up as either the judge or the jury, and that is something police and prosecutors absolutely should not do."
The defence wasn't in the dark only about the evolution of Turner's statement. A range of evidence potentially helpful to Hall was withheld, something the Crown now accepts was unfair. This included statements from the Easton brothers indicating they initially said the intruder was Māori, and a statement from an ambulance officer who said one of the boys had described the offender as "black".
Also withheld before trial was information about the other suspects, including the man who was the main focus of attention before Hall. The court was told all other suspects had been eliminated by police inquiries, but that is contested by Hall's team, who say the alibi of the former prime suspect, a strongly built Māori man, is far from solid.
Whereas Hall was previously not known to police, that suspect had an extensive criminal history, including for burglary and violence, and was out stealing in the neighbourhood on the night of the murder. He also appears to have lied in statements he made to police.
Among the masses of documents the Halls have accumulated over the decades is a docket indicating that after Hall had lost his appeal against conviction, a pair of jeans and a blue sweatshirt, both of which had traces of blood on them, were returned to this suspect. The blood on the jeans was type A, the same as Arthur Easton's. Hall's supporters have found no indication the man was questioned about this.
The Halls want accountability, and for those who took the decisions to change Turner's witness statement and conceal evidence to be identified. "It's serious what they did," says Geoff Hall. "Something must be done. The Crown and the police were sitting there in court and they said nothing when the judge told the jury that if there was [evidence] the intruder was Māori, then Alan didn't do it."
Alan Hall recently told Stuff it wouldn't be over until "the police and officers who did this get punished, get arrested, go to court, and the news media report on this and the public will hear about it". Hall was 23 when he was arrested. He is now 60.
There is an unfortunate footnote to all of this. Hall was released from prison only in March. He was previously released, in November 1994, but recalled to prison in 2012. The recall was not directly related to the murder but to a 1985 conviction for doing and permitting an indecent act with a boy under 16.
According to his family, Hall volunteered to police investigating Easton's murder that he had committed the sexual offences. His recall to prison was based on concerns he was filming boys' sports – even though this was done with the school's permission, and Hall provided the videos to the school.
He served another 10 years in jail, effectively for an offence for which he was originally fined $900.
If Hall's conviction is quashed as expected, he is likely to seek compensation. To qualify, he must prove he is innocent on "the balance of probabilities", a lower standard of proof than "beyond reasonable doubt".
The police have announced a review is under way of decisions made in the case but have yet to comment on whether it will be reopened. Hall's team say the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR) still has exhibits that could be retested with modern techniques.
The Easton family has expressed its support for the case to be reinvestigated “to ensure justice for all parties involved”.
