Bridges Simon: Crimes (Provocation Repeal) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Bridges Simon: Crimes (Provocation Repeal) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8257. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SIMON BRIDGES (National—Tauranga) 
: 
 I want to address the concerns of the Hon Rodney Hide. Before I do that I want to talk about the practice of this. I want to make some practical points. I will not take my full time but I want to make a practical point and then— 
H V Ross Robertson 
: We can all say that Simon. 
SIMON BRIDGES 
: Yes I will not take a long time until I really get into it. I want to take a practical standpoint and then get on to the principle that Rodney Hide has talked about. 
I have prosecuted murder cases and in 2007 with another prosecutor in the Bay of Plenty I prosecuted in a murder trial involving a man who over a period of a week—the Crown case stated—resolved to kill his ex-partner. He was really a man with intense jealousy. She had a new partner. The accused man and his ex-partner had two children. They had moved and they had separated. He texted her telling her I think from memory that he was going to kill her. Indeed on a Sunday night I think it was he came over to her place a couple of hours away from where he lived. He broke down the door. He knifed her and her partner in bed. They tried to escape out of the window. Their flesh I remember graphically was still all over the window and their blood ran down from the window to the ground which was two storeys. They crawled away. He followed them and he kept stabbing them and both bled to death. 
I can tell members that that was not provocation. It was never going to be provocation. Nevertheless that was indeed what he pleaded. That is what he argued in court and we went through the charade of a trial—because there was no other defence for that man. We went through the charade of a trial and he was found guilty after an hour or two and he received one of the longest sentences in New Zealand history. The reality is that nearly always—I do not have the figures before me—a defence of provocation fails. We go through the charade sometimes because there really is no other defence. I resolved in my own mind at that trial that practically it was a very very flawed partial defence and it should go. But I did so also for the principled reason that a murderous intent that results in a death is murder. It is nothing else. In our country and in all countries around the world labelling actually does matter. If with murderous intent a person kills someone then that person is a murderer—not a “manslaughterer”. That person is as I say a murderer. Labelling does matter. 
The defence of provocation it seems to me is entirely unprincipled. It says effectively that an accused person has been so offended that it was in some sense OK to do what he or she did. Well it was not and it was murder. I can tell members that for no other crime in this country does one today have the defence of provocation—in nothing else. It is very very common in courts in this county to have the situation where—I can think of two cases like this I have been involved with—a person has stabbed someone or beaten someone up badly and the reason for doing it was effectively that the person who was beaten up was a paedophile. Maybe he had done something to a cousin or a child. I can tell members something about the practicalities: the accused person nearly always gets off—that is the reality of it. But that person is not in principle entitled to the defence of provocation. Nor should someone be who murders someone with murderous intent. That person is a murderer. I think we are doing exactly the right thing today for practical as well as principled reasons.