Lundy to learn fate of appeal by Christmas
Twice-convicted double murderer Mark Lundy will know before Christmas if he will get a third trial.
The Supreme Court will deliver its judgment in Wellington at 11.30am today, after he appealed his case to the country’s highest court in August.
He maintains he did not murder his wife Christine and their 7-year-old daughter Christine in their Palmerston North home in August, 2000.
The pair were hacked to death with a weapon, believed to be a tomahawk, which has never been located.
He was first tried and jailed in 2002, but his convictions were quashed and a retrial ordered by the Privy Council in 2013.
He was again convicted and jailed in 2015, with the Court of Appeal upholding those convictions in 2018.
The Supreme Court is his last chance through the court system to clear his name. If he is successful, the court can order a retrial or quash his convictions for good.
His lawyer, Jonathan Eaton, QC, told the Supreme Court he wanted a third trial for Lundy.
The Supreme Court judges only had one issue to consider – if an alternative argument, known as a proviso, was enough to convict him.
Both his trials heard stains on a shirt of his contained DNA from Christine Lundy and brain or spinal cord tissue. A second technique was used for the retrial to find the tissue was likely to have come from a human, strengthening the Crown case.
The Court of Appeal ruled in 2018 the results from the second technique, which has only been used in Lundy’s case, should not have been put before the jury.
But it found the proviso – that Christine Lundy’s DNA and tissue, no matter its source, was enough to find Mark Lundy guilty – was strong enough.
Eaton told the Supreme Court all Lundy wanted was a trial with evidence not later found inadmissable.
The Supreme Court is Mark Lundy’s last chance through the court system to clear his name.