Borrows Chester: Criminal Procedure Bill — In Committee 
Borrows Chester: Criminal Procedure Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:647;Page:16616] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 I rise to make a couple of clarifying points in respect of comments made by the Minister Rick Barker. Initially I made a comment in respect of people who believe that people who are arrested and brought before the court do not deserve to be called innocent until proven guilty and that was that it was they who should go and live in Zimbabwe or Fiji as I asserted. I stand by that but it was not said in respect of this legislation. That would be to inflate the issue far beyond where it was. 
I want to make two or three points. One of them is that I was earlier described as a senior police officer. Well I never was. I got one rung off the ground as a detective sergeant. But what I did do as an officer in charge of a case was appear before 50 or 60 depositions hearings if not more. Later on as a prosecutor I probably ran another 30 or 40 depositions cases and then as defence counsel I probably appeared in something like 20 or 30 of them. I have got my head around depositions. The Minister said that the purpose of depositions was to lay out all the evidence before defence counsel and before the court but that is not true at all. All the prosecution has to do is supply sufficient information to prove there is a prima facie case to answer; that is it. As a prosecutor in a rape case for instance especially given the law as it was amended in 1985 I would put the statement of the complainant. I would probably call the mother to prove age and then present the case of the officer in charge of the case and that was it. I had only to prove a prima facie case. I did not have to trot out all the evidence. 
I want to say a few words for the  
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 record. When the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 came in the police lost a number of cases because they did not adhere to that Act. I predict that when this legislation is enacted the police will lose a whole lot more cases because they will not take this legislation seriously as it relates to disclosure. If the public thought it got its ears bashed around with three not guilty verdicts in the last few weeks they had better be prepared to lose a lot more. I cite for instance the Kahui case. On the Thursday before the trial was due to start on the Monday the defence counsel found that there had been very shoddy disclosure in the form of toll records from a cellphone that was in the company of Macsyna King. The dates of all the cellphone transactions were listed on the jobsheet except for the one that showed one particular transaction that happened in Mangere in the window of time that could have allowed somebody other than Chris Kahui to have committed the offence against the children. That was not disclosed. The police did a number of inquiries. They interviewed Macsyna King and her friend at length. They made a number of jobsheet inquiries. None of it was written down and it was never disclosed. I do not know when that was brought out before the jury because I could not interrogate them and neither could anyone else and I say “Good job.” to that. What was the effect of finding out that that fundamental fairness around disclosure was shown not to have happened in that Kahui case? I wonder how that played on the mind of the jury members who having adjourned for lunch and then deliberated for 10 minutes came back and gave a not guilty verdict? 
I just want to have on the  
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 record that there is an expectation I believe that where the police do not adhere to disclosure laws as they are written—and let us face it at the moment the police are already bound by common law; they are already bound with heaps of jurisprudence and they tend to ignore those from time to time in significant cases—where it is in black and white within this Act that it is the expectation of the Parliament that the police will adhere to those laws and where they do not adhere to those laws then the cases could easily be dismissed. There is a public expectation of the police acting in fairness on this issue.