TVNZ to appeal video confession ruling

Noel Rogers

Television New Zealand has appealed a decision barring it from showing a police video of a man apparently confessing to murder.

TVNZ's Sunday programme had planned to screen a video confession of Noel Rogers, who was acquitted in December of murdering Far North woman Katherine Sheffield in 1994.

The video confession had been deemed inadmissable by the Court of Appeal and was therefore not screened during Rogers' murder trial.

A High Court ruling denied TVNZ the right to screen the video, which was leaked to it by police in July last year, and ruled that TVNZ must give the tape back to the court.

Sunday executive producer Damien Comerford said TVNZ had applied for a stay to prevent it having to hand the tape back, and had today decided to appeal the ban on screening the confession.

"The appeal will mainly be on a legal basis," he said. "But we believe that the New Zealand public is entitled to see this video and we hope that the Court of Appeal will allow us to show it."

Justices Geoffrey Venning and Helen Winkelmann in a High Court ruling said that showing the tape would breach Rogers' privacy and it was a "weighty matter" the tape had been obtained in breach of his rights.

Mr Comerford said TVNZ had a different view and had no intention of handing the tape back.

"We say that there is no privacy issue here because all of the information relating to the video is already out in the public domain," he said.

"Plus he has already given an interview to TV3 News, so we will be bringing that up."

TVNZ hopes the case can be heard in early February.

Rogers was tried for Ms Sheffield's murder last year after his uncle, Lawrence Lloyd, served seven years of an 11-year sentence after being convicted of manslaughter in 1995.

Lloyd's conviction was overturned in the Court of Appeal in 2004.

- NZPA