STORY: "Scott Watson: Key witness Guy Wallace told to ‘tell the truth’ when saying Watson was not mystery man," by Reporter Melissa Nightingale, published by Radio New Zealand, on June 12, 2024. (Melissa Nightingale is a Wellington-based reporter who covers crime, justice and news in the capital. She joined the Herald in 2016 and has worked as a journalist for 10 years.")
KEY POINTS:
- Scott Watson’s lawyers are making submissions today in his appeal against convictions for the murder of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope in 1998
- The hearing in the Court of Appeal started on Monday
- Today’s arguments have centered on pressure put on key witness Guy Wallace to identify Watson as the mystery man, and on a photo of Watson shown to Wallace and other witnesses
GIST: "During a lengthy police interview with Guy Wallace who identified double murderer Scott Watson as the mystery man seen with Ben Smart and Olivia Hope, Wallace was urged by police to tell the truth, to the point he questioned whether police were blaming him for the murder.
Parts of the 193-page transcript of the police interview with Wallace were read out in the Court of Appeal this morning.
Watson’s lawyer Nick Chisnall KC, who is leading Watson’s appeal against his murder convictions, said the interviewing detective “made it clear that he considered Mr Wallace was lying”.
Smart, 21, and Hope 17, haven’t been seen since getting out of a water taxi and on to a boat moored in Endeavour Inlet in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1998. Their bodies and possessions have never been found.Wallace, who died in 2021, was the Crown’s key witness, with his evidence being central to the jury’s guilty verdicts.
Wallace had told police he took Smart and Hope and a mystery man to a ketch - not Watson’s yacht - making him one of the last people to see the victims alive. He also told police the mystery man was not the same person he had served drinks to at the bar at Furneaux Lodge earlier in the night.
Chisnall said the police interview was an attempt to break down Wallace’s statements on these two factors, and that the detective “urged Mr Wallace to tell the truth for the sake of the families of the missing”.
“I want to know the truth, there’s no more mucking around here today,” the detective told Wallace, according to the transcript.
He told him the person Wallace had served at the bar - who Wallace said was not Watson - didn’t exist.
“Oh f***, come on, what are you going to try to do, lay this on me?” Wallace responded.
He said there might have been two different men “sleazing around the bar” but he did not believe he had seen Watson, but the detective told him it was “not possible”.
He told Wallace he had spoken to everyone, and four other people had given a description of Watson.
“Perhaps you haven’t been telling the truth, Guy,” he said.
The officer “explicitly” told Wallace that Watson was the man at the bar, Chisnall said and asked why “you can’t remember a guy that everyone else remembers”.
Chisnall said Wallace’s eventual identification of Watson as the mystery man when seen in a photo montage “was irretrievably tainted earlier in the investigation”.
Trial counsel and the jury at Watson’s trial had not known police already showed Wallace a photo of Watson earlier, he said. Wallace had also been shown a photo of Watson by the media.
Chisnall said Wallace had told police he didn’t recognise Watson on two, possibly three, occasions before he identified him.
Watson’s team are asking the court to allow the appeal, but not to order a retrial.
Watson was convicted of double murder in September 1999 and sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum period of 17 years in jail. He has now spent 26 years behind bars, protesting his innocence.
The latest appeal is the result of a royal prerogative of mercy, applied for in 2017 and granted in 2020. The grounds for the appeal are two-fold:
- The reliability of DNA evidence, specifically hairs that were thought to belong to Hope and were recovered from Watson’s boat.
- Mistakes by the police in using a photo montage as a means of identifying Watson. The montage contained a new photo that showed Watson caught halfway through a blink. This gave the appearance of hooded eyes, a characteristic of the mystery man’s description.
Watson is not attending the Court of Appeal hearing, which is before Justices Christine French, Patricia Courtney and Susan Thomas.
The hearing continues.
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/scott-watson-key-witness-guy-wallace-told-to-tell-the-truth-when-saying-watson-was-not-mystery-man/2CT3CPJZLBBGZGD2BVRZTK74WA/SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater's attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, "Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it's the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-12348801
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SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
---------------------------------------------------------------
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
—————————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
————————————————————————————
YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater's attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, "Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it's the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-12348801
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