Tag Archives: Courts

Two offenders, different treatments.

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See if you can spot the difference.

An Iranian born female MP from a progressive party is accused of serial shoplifting. Her name is leaked to the media, which goes into a pack frenzy even before the Police launch an investigation. She resigns from parliament, declines to seek name suppression (what was the point?) and eventually pleads guilty to several charges of non-violent property crime involving goods worth less than $9,000 (which is a cut-off standard for sentencing purposes). Her court appearance is the lead story in most media even though there are a couple of major wars and several famines occurring, to say nothing of a number of developments in NZ politics and society that are a bit more significant than the travails of a troubled individual. She and her disgrace are headline news in NZ.

On the other hand there is a male Pakeha “senior political figure” in a rightwing party who during the course of a fraud investigation had someone come forth accusing him of serial sexual offending. Eventually the number of charges grew to nine involving at least two victims. He resigned his senior party position once the fraud investigation heated up, and then he was charged with the sex offences. The offending is historical and related to a well known volunteer service organization in which he held senior leadership roles and was involved with young people in a mentoring role. The judge assigned to the case granted him and his party name suppression in 2023 because, among other things, disclosure of their identities might have a negative impact on his party’s chances in the 2023 election. The judge ordered that the suppression order be reviewed after the election.

The election happened six months ago. No review of the suppression order has been undertaken. The trial of this person has been put off until August 2024. As far as I can tell (am happy to be proven wrong), the media have done nothing to find out why his name suppression continues. The Leader of his party has been asked directly about the case and answers by talking about contempt of court. Worst yet, the media has not asked questions as to why a judge would introduce explicitly political criteria into a decision to grant name suppression in light of the seriousness of the charges, which involve physical sexual assaults on minors. During the build up to an election.

I asked these questions in a series of social media posts. I respected the name suppression order but spoke about the background of the case. Although I received many positive responses I also received a number of veiled threats that I was violating the suppression order by alluding to this man, even obliquely. That is besides the fact that his offending is an open secret in the volunteer circles in which he was a prominent figure, his party affiliation and former role is common knowledge in political circles, and his name has been disclosed in a number of social media outlets and even mentioned in parliament (which even if done under parliamentary privilege and struck from the written record, lives on in the video archive of the debates at the time of his mention). I am told by these critics that it does not matter if others have previously spoken of him in direct terms and that I am liable for up to six months in jail for my “criminal offending” (exact words). If so, I am going to have to get in the back of a long que of criminal offenders and the taxpayers are gong to have to fork out a fair amount of public money having the Crown prosecute us. Selective prosecution, say of me, would only worsen the situation when it comes to the appearance of (at a minimum) Crown bias and (at worst) judicial integrity and neutrality.

I suspect that the threats of legal retribution are coming from within this fellow’s political party. The concern is more about protecting him and the Party rather than seeking justice for his alleged victims or adhering to judicial standards about protecting victims and presumptions of innocence. Plus, the threats have a sort of finger-in-the-dike quality to them, as there will be a flood of coverage once the legal circus hits the road. That is, assuming that things ever get to trial and some sort of pre-trial agreement in not reached (which I think is possible at this point. The trouble with any such deal is that it will likely include some form of permanent name suppression in exchange for a guilty plea to some of the charges).

However things end up, there remains a deeply troubling aspect to this study in contrasts. The first is the media’s behaviour. It involves the hounding the former MP-turned private citizen on the one hand, and the ignoring of the other case almost entirely. This follows a media pattern of going after female progressive politicians for their indiscretions while largely soft-peddling similar behaviour from male politicians. Moreover, it is not as if name suppression prevents intrepid reporters from digging into the larger story of the male senior political figure in more depth, even if as background to the coverage of the trial when it happens (there is plenty of coverage from 2021 to last year). The media double-standard is stark: young female progressive gets the full “cameras in the face and shouted questions” treatment, whereas when it comes to this alleged Pakeha male serial sexual predator, there are nothing but crickets.

Even so, the worst part of this sorry dichotomy is the use by a judge in a criminal case of overtly political criteria as a factor in granting name suppression for a defendant–specifically the possible impact on a political party’s election chances if one of its senior member’s name is released before the election after being charged with sex offences. In my view political considerations simply should not be a criteria for name suppression, ever, and even more so if it involves a senior leader of a party about to contest a national election. That the ruling went unchallenged (as far as I know) and that the media did not question the rationale behind it is a disgrace. It brings the neutrality and/or judgement of that judge into question and opens the door to doubts about equal standards of justice in NZ. Even the appearance of anything other than impartiality and neutrality is a stain on NZ’s judicial good name, and this decision does not look good.

I understand that name suppression orders are designed to protect victims as well as the reputations and livelihoods of people accused of crimes (the sex charge defendant’s name was also suppressed because it was accepted by the court that he could not find a job if his name were revealed and he could therefore lose his house). But in this case the victims are now adults, at least some have come forward already, the defendant has been identified in a fraud investigation involving that voluntary organisation as well as in parliament, multiple face-blurred photos of him have been published that are no impediment to identifying him (especially the ones in which he appears more than once in a distinctive shirt at the fraud and sex charge hearings), and the elections are over and done with (his party did well in them and is now part of government). None of what I have said here or in other fora adds any new light on his identity. It is out there for those who are interested in finding out.

What I have done in this and the other posts is pose an open question about media double standards and judicial neutrality in his case. As I said elsewhere, something smells, and it is not the aroma of purloined boutique shop designer brand merchandise.

Differential Justice.

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For some time now I have wondered about standards of justice in NZ. Coming from the US and Latin America it seems that all to often people convicted of serious crimes are handed fairly light sentences, including violent recidivists. I understand the importance of rehabilitation over punishment, but sometimes it seems that the Courts let very unpleasant people get away with their crimes.

I thought of this recently when I read the news about a teenager hit and run driver who killed a boy crossing a crosswalk on his bike and who not only did not show any remorse, but in fact posed for a social media photo in an orange jump suit and Halloween makeup, presumably as a joke on where she could be headed. She got 11 months home detention and 250 hours community service instead.

That seeming injustice brought home another recent court case, one in which a famous Blenheim winery was fined $400,000 for adding post-fermentation sugar to its export wine in violation of EU standards (to which much of the wine was headed). The winery owner, a general manager and a wine-maker were fined between $20,000 and $35,000 each for their role in the subterfuge, which involved 6.5 million liters of wine, 3.7 million of which was sent to the EU between mid 2013 and late 2015.

That seemed about right to me. The Crown argued for serious fines because it damaged the reputation of the entire NZ wine industry. The individual fines were high enough to send a message of warning to others so inclined to cheat for opportunistic advantage, and the company fine was presumably large enough to make a negative impression on its bottom line.

Contrast this judgement against that handed down to a Hamilton-based aerospace company that sold a utility aircraft to a Chinese aerospace company knowing that it would be on-sold to North Korea in violation of international sanctions. Because the plane had potential military as well as civilian applications (such as parachuting) and was seen at an air show in DPRK Air Force livery, the violation was of “tier one” seriousness. 

The Chinese aerospace company has in fact majority ownership of the Hamilton company and three of its executives sit on the company board of directors. The contract for the plane included post-sale parts supply and servicing by Hamilton-based mechanics, so the initial claims that the company had no idea that the plane was on-sold to the DPRK fell flat in court. In fact, the entire defence went from “we assumed it would be used in the PRC” to “we did not know where it would end up” to “we did not know about the sanctions” in a hurry. That also did not stand up to the light of prosecutorial scrutiny as the Crown demonstrated that the firm falsified export documents in order to get the plane on its way out of NZ. Selling the plane directly to the DPRK would have required a special export license and would have been prohibited by the international sanctions regime. Selling to the Chinese parent company incurred neither constraint.

In other countries similar “tier one” violations of the international sanctions regime have resulted in million dollar company fines and jail time for company executives involved in the sanction-busting. There are enough successful prosecutions of such violators in Europe, the US and the Commonwealth to provide the Courts with sentencing guidelines. So what did the rogue Hamilton company get for what is an egregious violation of international norms that potentially damaged the reputation of the entire NZ aviation industry?

A $50,000 fine and no punishment to any individual. In some circles where corruption is rife that would be considered to be the acceptable, if not normal price for conducting dodgy business dealings. But is that the way business is conducted in NZ?

In light of the very different sentences handed down in these two cases, my questions are this: which is worse, the sugared wine scandal or the sanctions-busting affair? Is deceiving commercial partners overseas worse than helping a rogue dictatorship with nuclear ambitions and an atrocious human rights record skirt measures emplaced to hinder its ability to continue unchecked? Is international sanctions-busting considered to be a lesser offence than playing sleigh of hand with a commercial export product?

Perhaps the laws on the books limit the types of punishment available to the Crown when it comes to sanctions busting by NZ firms but give wider and heavier range to the penalties for instances of corporate malfeasance that do not involve sanction violations. If so, then the laws needed to be amended because if anything violating international sanctions regimes is a worse reflection on a country’s governance than is cheating within private commercial networks . If not, then the justice meted out in these cases appears at odds with international precedent and compound the reputation damage done by the Hamilton aviation firm because it gives the impression that “tier one” international sanctions violators will be treated more leniently in NZ courts than unethical commodity exporters.

If one egregious Kiwi-based sanction-busting firm can get away with a financial slap on the wrist when caught, so too may others decide that is an acceptable price to pay in the pursuit of profit over principle. That is another area where the application of differential and universal justice comes into play.