PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I will be following this trial very carefully as it is very rare for police officers to be charged with perverting the course of justice decades after their conduct - way over the line - has literally caused an innocent accused person to be convicted of a very serious crime. As you will see below, in Alan Hall's case, the two ex-police officers are accused are accused of perverting the course of justice by altering the written statement of the key witness, leaving out the reported ethnicity from the statement, while adding other erroneous incriminating information about Alan Hall into the statement and failing to disclose to the defence information about another suspect. These officers have been investigated and charged without bowing to the temptation of police, prosecutors, and politicians to expose heinous police skulduggery to the public eye. In Tim Rees' Ontario case, police officers buried a video (discovered in an unmarked box in the police chief's office, many years after he was convicted by the jury and he had exhausted all his appeals) which utterly cleared Tim Rees, and unequivocally implicated the deceased 10-year-old girl's family's landlord as a viable suspect. But unlike the Hall case, no officer has been charged, it's not clear whether any of the officers (or prosecutors) involved in the investigation have been investigated, the case has hardly received public attention (unlike the Hall case which led to compensation, and public rage at the police conduct which led to his being compensated, and to a reward being offered for information leading to the conviction of the real murderer. To Ontario's great shame, the decision of the three judges who conducted an evidence hearing ordered by the federal minister of justice because of a likely miscarriage of justice is cold, and legalistic, and lacks the fire, the anger one would expect Ontario's highest judges to experience when confronted by such an unforgivable miscarriage of justice of this magnitude. They stayed silent instead of condemning the outrageous, if not criminal police behaviour, which led to the imprisonment of an innocent man. Like the Alan Hall case - 'an unforgivable miscarriage of justice.' Stay tuned, dear readers, That's why I will be following the trial of the two officers in the UK so closely.
Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.
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STORY: "Arthur Easton case: Former police officer on trial takes stand for first time," by Radio New Zealand (RNZ) Journalist Matthew Theunissen, on July 15, 2026.
GIST: A contradictory, unreliable, fleeting glimpse.
That's how a former police detective described evidence of a key Crown witness who says he saw a tall Māori man running across the road near to where Arthur Easton was murdered by a bayonet-wielding intruder.
Alan Hall spent 17 years in jail after being found guilty of Easton's murder in his Papakura home in 1985. His conviction was quashed in 2022 after the Supreme Court found a miscarriage of justice had occurred.
Two former police officers, who have name suppression, are on trial in the High Court at Auckland where it's alleged they withheld key witness evidence that could have helped with Hall's defence.
Key to the Crown case is the evidence of witness Ronald Turner, who said he saw a tall Māori man running across the road near to where Easton was murdered.
That evidence was never presented to the jury at the trial of Hall, who is a 5 foot 7 Pākehā.
One of the former police officers entered the witness box on Wednesday and was asked by his lawyer, David Jones KC, about his understanding of the police's disclosure obligations at the time of the investigation.
"Well if issues were serious crime and we had the Crown advising and going to prosecute, the responsibility for any disclosure rested with the Crown," the man said.
Disclosure is where relevant documents about a case are handed to the defence.
Likewise, the former officer felt those responsibilities lay with the Crown when Hall appealed his sentence, which he ultimately did five times.
"Our role was basically to extract from the file the documents that they were seeking to place before the Court of Appeal."
Turner was driving through Papakura on the night of Easton's murder when he saw a person he described as a tall Māori man acting suspiciously and running across Clevedon Road.
The former officer explained to the court how police tested this evidence by carrying out a so-called "sighting experiment", in which officers recreated Turner's account of that night. It concluded that Turner could not have determined the man's ethnicity.
The former officer was asked directly about the allegations he is facing.
"Did you ever do anything, as far as you are concerned, which would have interfered with the proper course of justice?" Jones asked.
"No I did not," the man replied.
"Did you ever have an intent to interfere with the proper course of justice?"
"No I did not," he said.
Questioned by Crown prosecutor John Billington KC, the former officer was asked why Turner's statement to police was different to the version presented at Hall's trial.
"We have some detail around his age, his height, his clothing and his mannerisms. They seem to be the same, don't they?" Billington asked. "Can you identify a difference between the two statements?"
"Well they're obviously couched in a slightly different manner," the man replied.
"The omission of the word Māori would be a difference, wouldn't it?" Billington added.
The defendant reiterated it was for the Crown to decide what evidence to include.
Billington said that as an experienced police officer, the man should have known how important Turner's evidence was.
"If Mr Turner had told the jury that the person he saw was a Māori, the prosecution case failed, didn't it?"
"Not necessarily," the man replied.
The trial before Justice Gault is expected to continue into next week."
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/crime-and-justice/723631/arthur-easton-case-former-police-officer-on-trial-takes-stand-for-first-time
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. 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;
