Appeal Court quashes murder conviction

Press, 3 September 1981, Page 2

Appeal Court quashes murder conviction

PA Wellington Prolonged interrogation by the police of a youth charged with murder was "unfair and oppressive,” the Court of Appeal held yesterday. The Court allowed an appeal by Darrell Patai Wilson, aged 17, unemployed, against his conviction in the High Court at Palmerston North for the murder of an elderly woman, Lorna Florence Robinson, at her Foxton home on January 15. The grounds of the appeal were that oral and written statements obtained from Wilson by the police ought not to have been admitted as evidence at the trial. The Court, comprising Mr Justice Cooke, Mr Justice Richardson, and Mr Justice Barker, quashed the conviction and ordered a new trial. “In our opinion the prolonged interrogation in the confinement of a small room has to be ■ treated, in all circumstances, as unfair and oppressive,” the Court’s judgment said.

“While not involving violence, the oppression had a physical character putting it in the category of ‘other

form of compulsion.’ “Accordingly, the oral and written statements were not admissible, no matter whether or not the means employed to induce them were likely to cause an untrue admission of guilt. “We do not overlook that from one point of view the influencing of the appellant to speak could be called a very effective piece of police work, nor that this was a brutal and shocking killing of a defenceless, elderly woman in her own home. “But it is fundamental to the New Zealand system of justice that confession obtained by overbearing the will of a person in custody by tactics amounting to compulsion will not be received in evidence. Whether a case is of that kind is a question of fact and degree. In our opinion this case is. “The means employed here would be dangerous as a precedent to be countenanced by this Court. “With some reluctance but without doubt we hold that they must be regarded as in themselves involving a miscarriage of justice.”