Reliability for jury, not police, to decide - former High Court judge tells trial

A former High Court judge says it was for a jury, not the police, to decide whether a witness who saw a man running from the scene of Arthur Easton's murder in 1985 was relevant to the case.

Alan Hall spent 17 years in prison after being convicted of murdering Easton, who was killed during a home invasion by a man wielding a bayonet.

The decision was quashed by the Supreme Court in 2022 after it found a substantial miscarriage of justice had occurred.

Two former police officers, whose names are suppressed, are now on trial in the High Court at Auckland charged with wilfully attempting to obstruct, prevent, pervert or defeat the course of justice.

The case hinges on the testimony of one key witness: Ronald Turner.

On the night of 13 October 1985, Turner was in his car with his wife when he saw a man acting suspiciously and running across Clevedon Road in Papakura.

He told police the man was Māori and about six feet tall.

Hall, then aged 23, was 5 foot 7, of slight build and Pākehā.

While some of Turner's evidence was presented to the jury at the trial, his description of the man he'd seen was not.

Former High Court judge Kit Toogood KC, who was working as a prosecutor at the time, was called as an expert witness in today's case against the police officers.

He was asked whether it was acceptable to leave such evidence out, even if police deemed it unreliable.

"I don't believe that's any ground at all. Reliability was a matter for the jury or the decider of fact in the trial," he said.

"The fact that either the police or the Crown prosecutor might have thought the evidence was unreliable was not relevant to the decision or the obligation of disclosure."

Toogood stressed how crucial Ronald Turner's evidence was to the trial.

"He was at pains, in a subsequent interview by the police, to stress his certainty about the ethnicity of the person he'd seen running away."

Paul Wicks KC, who's representing one of the defendants, asked whether Toogood accepts that assessing the relevance of evidence is subjective.

"Yes, I do. But I think if you're talking about this case I don't agree that this was a marginal case.

"I think the materiality of Mr Turner's descriptions of the person he saw as Māori was obviously highly material."

He was asked whether he believed it assisted the crown's case against Hall.

"Well it must have assisted the Crown's case because of Mr Hall's appearance when he was definitely not Maori," he said.

The court also heard from Charles Cato, a defence lawyer who worked on the preliminary hearing ahead of Hall's trial.

Cato went on to become a judge for Tonga's Supreme Court.

Had Hall's trial lawyer known about the witness description of the man running away from the scene, Cato said it could have made a big difference to how his defence was conducted.

"If he had that kind of discrepancy, he could have made a great deal of it before a jury."

Cato was cross examined by the other defendant's lawyer, David Jones KC, about Hall's admission to owning the bayonet used in the killing and possession of a hat found at the crime scene.

"If someone owns the murder weapon and cannot explain how it came to be at a murder scene in a way that exculpates that person, they have a very real problem, don't they?" Jones said.

"Yes," replied Cato.

Hall has been present in the public gallery every day of the trial.