Mrs P shouldn’t be revictimised

Mrs P did not get a fair hearing from the justice system. That was compellingly revealed by Kirsty Johnston’s investigation for Stuff last week detailing the background to Mrs P’s charge of changing an ACC document and lying about being abused by her husband during a 16-year marriage.

The tale it tells is complicated in the details but thorough in its conclusion: when the Court of Appeal quashed Mrs P’s conviction for perjury, the judges said, ‘‘We consider that a miscarriage of justice has occurred.’’

By that time, Mrs P had spent a year on home detention, had lost her job as a teacher, and had been reduced to living on a benefit in a garage with no hot water.

The day after that story was published, Justice Minister Kris Faafoi appeared to pre-emptively rule out any chance of compensation for Mrs P on the grounds that the Government’s guidelines for compensation apply only to cases where the wrongfully convicted person has been imprisoned.

Two key pillars of our justice system are fairness and independence. If either pillar is compromised, the legitimacy of the judicial edifice is weakened. Fairness demands that, if someone is found to have been wrongfully convicted, then that needs to be acknowledged and redressed. Yet independence demands that the courts are protected from meddling by politicians. So it is perhaps not surprising that the justice minister would find it easier to lean on the compensation guidelines the Government adopted in 2020 rather than the facts of this case.

But any reader would rightly be outraged by how Mrs P was treated by the justice system and think that some compensation was deserved. As University of Otago law professor Andrew Geddis noted in a piece for the Spinoff website, ‘‘if the power of the state is used wrongly to deprive you of your liberty and so take most everything from you, then it should then do something to help undo that harm’’.

Guidelines are just that – a guide to what cases should be recommended to Cabinet, which holds the power to grant ‘‘ex gratia’’ (by favour) payments. In other words, the Government reserves to itself the discretion to do Mrs P or any other wrongfully convicted person the ‘‘favour’’ of redressing a state-sanctioned injustice.

Furthermore, those guidelines set out harms that would justify a payment of $150,000 per year of wrongful imprisonment, and most of them appear to apply equally to home detention and imprisonment. There is a reasonable argument that the deprivations of prison exceed those of home detention, but surely that argues for less compensation, rather than none at all.

Hiding behind guidelines that appear to be unfair and pointlessly rigid is no way to inspire faith in our justice system.

And for all their pomp and circumstance, the courts are part of a faith-based system. If the public doesn’t believe the justice system is being fair and that it lacks the ability to self-correct, then its legitimacy and ultimately its authority are undermined.

The case of Mrs P has revealed stark inequities in the guidelines around wrongful conviction compensation and whether she decides to formally seek compensation or not, they should be reviewed.

Mrs P is already a victim of domestic abuse. She shouldn’t also be victimised by a justice system that isn’t flexible enough when it comes to recognising victims of its own mistakes.

Hiding behind guidelines that appear pointlessly rigid is no way to inspire faith in our justice system.