Tolley Anne; Little AndrewCRIMINAL CASES REVIEW COMMISSION BILLThird ReadingDEPUTY SPEAKER: I call the Hon—Hon Andrew Little: Andrew Little.DEPUTY SPEAKER: —Andrew Little sorry. Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): I'm such a forgettable person! I move That the Criminal Cases Review Commission Bill be now read a third time.Can I begin by thanking members of the House through the committee stage—and indeed members of the Justice Committee—for getting the bill to the point it is at the moment and there were changes that the bill achieved through those stages. I think we have a very good bill and I'm going to talk a little bit about the motivation for it the objectives of it and what I think it will do in relation to our criminal justice system.I want to acknowledge members opposite particularly Chris Penk and the Hon Tim Macindoe who I know made very worthy contributions as they do on most things actually but they did in the committee stage of this bill and I took the time to assiduously read their contributions because I normally hang on their every word!Hon Tim Macindoe: Ha ha!Hon ANDREW LITTLE: I don't know why Mr Macindoe finds that very funny; I'd find it flattering normally. I think the way that the National Party has approached it—I know they don't support the bill generally but their attitude has been notwithstanding their in-principle objections to an organisation like this nevertheless they wanted the bill to be as perfect as it possibly could be. They made some interesting contributions about how the rights of victims fit into the work of a Criminal Cases Review Commission.If I go back to the beginning right now for a person who has been convicted of a crime who is determined and who strongly feels and may well be innocent and they've exhausted all their appeal rights right now we have the process called the royal prerogative of mercy. At the moment the mechanics of that are that a person will apply usually to the Governor-General—possibly they'll go directly to the Minister of Justice. In any event the application will be referred to the Ministry of Justice and its legal section to find somebody who's got a bit of time up their sleeves to examine it—examine the application triage it—and if they think it has merit maybe it'll be briefed out to a lawyer who has to have time and they will have to find time to do that. Or the legal department of the Ministry of Justice may well decide in their triaging sort of approach that it doesn't warrant any further attention. Either way it is very close to the executive for what ought to be in relation to an appeal against a conviction or a re-examination of a conviction independent of the executive.Other countries in the world have grappled with this—other Commonwealth countries notably England and Scotland. They both have Criminal Cases Review Commissions and they were motivated by the fact that they had cases that had gone right through their court processes their appeal processes and yet convictions were upheld which were then found to be demonstrably unjust unjustified and actually just wrong. Innocent people were locked up in some cases for extensive periods of time and the criminal justice system simply wasn't nimble enough agile enough or flexible enough to discover the conviction of the innocent early enough and so those people ended up spending a lot of time inside.Now we've had cases in this country even quite recently where exactly the same thing has happened. You can think of some of the leading cases where somebody has been convicted has appealed has had their conviction quashed and a retrial ordered has been convicted again and then subsequently found to be totally innocent. Teina Pora is probably the most recent one of those but you could think about Arthur Allan Thomas. He had two trials and two appeals to the Court of Appeal before not through a royal prerogative of mercy process—it was a very special process engineered by the Prime Minister of the day Robert Muldoon—that resulted in him being considered to be innocent and a pardon issued. A very rare thing for a pardon to be issued.The Criminal Cases Review Commission Bill provides a genuinely independent approach to dealing with those cases of miscarriage of justice and is dedicated—and I suspect it will be—because they will have to be a determined body of people who will conduct the investigations examine the background to the case and the conviction and decide whether or not there are grounds therefore to refer it to the Court of Appeal for a review of the conviction.The reality is that as good as our justice system is no justice system is perfect; it gets things wrong but sometimes it gets things spectacularly wrong. We just need to have that other safety valve that allows for those who are innocent but who find themselves convicted for whatever reason—overzealous policing or investigative or detective work that leads people to draw conclusions and draw inferences that they're not entitled to do; perhaps not very well represented at the trial stage of their court case. They end up convicted and they get drawn into the system. The reality about the justice system good as it is in very very many respects—very good as it is in fact—is it does have the capacity to be somewhat self-perpetuating once it makes a set of findings and draws a conclusion. It is sometimes very hard to shift the system off that and so this is a way of making sure that those who having exhausted their appeal rights are innocent strongly believe themselves to be innocent and for which there are good grounds can go to find a place where their case—their circumstances—can be examined.The benefit of this approach too is that it's not bound up in the legal niceties that you would expect in an appeal process. It is an opportunity to kind of take a step back go back to square one perhaps look at the evidence—perhaps even investigate other possibilities that weren't properly examined at the time the case was being managed through the courts—and potentially discover that somebody has been wrongfully convicted and there's been a miscarriage of justice.I know that members opposite were concerned about the impact of these sorts of processes on victims of crime and we know that any appeal process for the victims of a crime particularly where there has been a conviction can be an even more confusing and sometimes traumatising time for victims because just as they are in the process of putting what has been a traumatic event behind them it all gets dug up again. I get correspondence from people who've had that experience. I know how it feels. I've heard from people about that. The bill as it currently stands as we go through this third reading does already require—or at least places the Criminal Cases Review Commission under the Victims' Rights Act. So there is a notification obligation on the Criminal Cases Review Commission.But I just make this point though too: from the position of the person who is innocent the person who has been wrongfully convicted it is very important for the sake of the victim to let them know what is happening on a matter that could affect them but there can be no greater injustice—apart obviously from the wrongful conviction—than for a victim to discover that the person who was accused of harming them and convicted of harming them hasn't actually done it and that the person who has harmed them is actually running around in the community somewhere scot-free. That is an injustice too and it's not just an injustice to the person wrongfully convicted; it's an injustice to the victim as well.So this bill far from creating problems for victims is actually about putting at peace victims who have been wrongfully led to believe that the person who perpetrated harm against them has been brought to justice and the matter is all closed. The reality about injustice is this as we know—a sense of injustice—someone who has genuinely been done an injustice never lets it go. It sits in the craw it gnaws away at you it bedevils you it burdens you and that is why the extra safety valve that the Criminal Cases Review Commission provides to our criminal justice system will be a very important one will be a very good one.When I look at the experience of Criminal Cases Review Commissions in other countries—Norway is the only other country that has one—there is a bit of going out to prisons and prisoners because we know there are people in prison who do not know how to access services that might lead to a wrongful conviction being discovered and therefore being put right. So they go out and do that. But the estimates are that there will be a handful of cases each year as there are a handful of applications for the royal prerogative of mercy at the moment and there will be the opportunity now to give a thoroughgoing examination to any application like that so those issues of injustice can hopefully finally be put to bed.I know that one issue that also exercised the members opposite was the make-up of the commission and the fact that there will be people with a non-legal background on the commission. What has been shown in other jurisdictions actually is that that is helpful—people with a social work background. IRD investigators for example in the UK make up people in the commission because they bring a different perspective a not entirely legal perspective to it which is also important when considering issues where the legal system actually has slipped up. You need a bit of external common sense brought to it.So on that basis I'm very pleased to see the bill in this stage and I commend it to the House.