Bid to lift 25-year-old suppression
Argument preliminary to perjury case against ‘Witness C’ in Tamihere murder trial
The High Court will today be asked to lift a 25-year-old name suppression order for a jailhouse witness now accused of perjury. The case involves prominent names in New Zealand’s recent criminal history, and an informant known as “Witness C”.
Witness C is accused of giving false testimony at the trial of David Tamihere by claiming that Tamihere confessed to him that he murdered Urban Hoglin and Heidi Paakkonen, the Swedish backpackers who disappeared on the Coromandel Peninsula in 1989.
Career criminal and jailhouse legal advocate Arthur Taylor has brought a private perjury prosecution against the jailhouse informant who was labelled Witness C at Tamihere’s 1990 trial for double murder.
Tamihere, who denies the murders and that he confessed, was convicted.
He was released from prison on parole in 2010.
Taylor alleges that Witness C admitted to him that he lied at the trial.
A judge has ruled that Taylor be allowed out of Auckland Prison at Paremoremo to argue the name suppression issue in person.
The argument about Witness C’s name suppression is a preliminary to the perjury case. The Auckland District Court has ruled Witness C has a case to answer. He has entered pleas of not guilty and elected trial by jury on nine charges asserting that he made statements about Tamihere on oath or in a sworn affidavit knowing them to be untrue.
The informant told jurors that Tamihere confessed to him that he killed the Swedish couple before dumping their weighted bodies at sea.
Hoglin’s remains were discovered on land in October 1991. No trace of Paakkonen has been found.
Taylor argues in submissions filed with the court that the Government had in recent years raised the bar for name suppression, that this was being thwarted by the 1990 order, as was the opportunity for the court hearing the perjury charges to decide in the current circumstances whether to grant suppression.
Charging documents lodged with the Auckland District Court set out nine assertions that Witness C is alleged to have made on oath or in a sworn affidavit knowing they were untrue.
Taylor is serving a sentence on drugs charges.
Witness C is currently in prison having twice been recalled to serve a life sentence for a double murder.