Why the CTV case won’t go away
The head of the police investigation into the Canterbury Television (CTV) building collapse is at ease with the decision not to press charges over the tragedy. He also doesn’t resile from any part of a newly released letter he wrote to Crown Law last year
From the outside, Detective Superintendent Peter Read’s position seems hopelessly contradictory. How can you think that the Government’s top lawyers fundamentally misunderstood key evidence supporting the police recommendation to lay criminal charges in the CTV case, yet now agree with those same lawyers that no charges should be laid? And how can that agreement be the opposite of what you used to think, but also the same, because, as Read says, police ‘‘started on the premise that we didn’t think we were ever going to get a conviction’’?
Like so much to do with the building that collapsed during the February 22, 2011 Christchurch earthquake, killing 115 people, the answers are complicated. They have been complicated further by the release of documents that show just how far apart police and Crown Law were on certain aspects of the investigation.
In the middle of last year, police sent their case, calling for manslaughter charges to be laid against David Harding, the engineer who designed the building, and his boss Alan Reay, to Crown Law for review. On August 4, deputy solicitor-general Brendan Horsley sent back a draft review to Read: the Government’s lawyers had some serious problems with the case, including the robustness of the expert evidence, the ability to prove the conduct of Harding and Reay was a ‘‘major departure’’ from their responsibilities, that those departures unquestionably caused the CTV building to collapse during the earthquake and that the case would ever get past New Zealand’s archaic ‘year and a day’ rule around criminal liability. They recommended against prosecution.
Documents show that a week later, Read sent a remarkable reply to Horsley, telling him Crown Law had it wrong.
‘‘The overriding sense from reading the Crown Law letter and the conclusion is that there is a misinterpretation or lack of understanding of the [police engineering expert] Beca report and the peer reviewers’ findings.’’
He then proceeded, across 28 paragraphs, to detail exactly how police, or Beca, believed Crown Law had erred. It focused almost entirely on the expert engineering evidence, but also pushed back on Crown Law’s reading of the ‘year and a day’ issue and public interest considerations. Horsley also lent weight, to Read’s chagrin, to alternative collapse theories roundly dismissed by the police experts: ‘‘Many of the concerns raised about causation in the Crown Law letter are not current issues to Beca and the peer reviewers,’’ Read wrote.
‘‘The Police maintain the view that there is evidential sufficiency to proceed and that the public interest test is met’’.
By November, police no longer maintained that view. They announced at a press conference that month there would be no prosecution. This week, Read explained the about-turn to The Press. Some things, he said, hadn’t changed.
‘‘I don’t resile from anything in that letter.
‘‘I didn’t think the first draft [of Horsley’s letter] had taken enough cognisance of what the experts had said and in some aspects [Crown law] put themselves as the experts and made decisions in relation to that. That was the reason for that letter. Some of the arguments that they’d had in the second and final version I thought was more accurate but I still didn’t agree with the interpretation of the experts’ opinion.’’
Even so, police came round to Crown Law’s way of thinking. This was mostly down to evidential sufficiency in other areas, Read said. Like the ‘a year and a day’ rule, which Crown Law saw as ‘‘potentially fatal’’ to a prosecution case. Also, one of the engineers who peer-reviewed Beca’s findings couldn’t guarantee that, despite Harding and Reay’s substandard work, ‘‘the collapse would not have occurred in the absence of the identified errors’’. Crown Law honed in on that, too. Whatever police thought of Crown Law’s take on the expert evidence, Read said, when everything else was taken together, it was hard to dismiss. ‘‘We’d been very, very close to that investigation all the way through and you need to take a step back on occasion and be a little bit dispassionate and that’s what we did.’’
It wasn’t until early November that police changed their mind, Read said. ‘‘We got to the point where all we’re doing is putting off the inevitable, and the hope that we could have got through to a stage where a jury would have closed the door and gone away and made a decision was very, very unlikely.’’
Oddly, this had been the police position throughout the investigation.
‘‘We all started on the premise that we didn’t think we were ever going to get a conviction, purely and simply because it’s really complicated,’’ Read said. So complicated that when new officers joined the investigation, they were given at least two weeks before interviewing any witnesses. Enough time to come up to speed with the technical aspects of the case.
‘‘There’s so many different strands,’’ Read said, ‘‘It would be very, very easy to get a jury confused with all the issues that would be raised.’’
So, when the police report was completed in May, Read was still of the opinion they wouldn’t get a conviction but should still prosecute. This was a problem, because one of the solicitorgeneral’s prosecution guidelines is ‘‘a reasonable prospect of conviction’’. Why, then, didn’t the case fall at the first hurdle?
‘‘It warranted a thorough investigation,’’ Read said, ‘‘You couldn’t just give it a once over lightly and say, ‘We’re not going to bother because it’s too complicated’. We had to take it to a point where, ‘Can we actually drag it over the line?’’’
‘‘For us it boiled down to, ‘What was the moral thing to do?’’’
In that context, Read’s position doesn’t seem so contradictory. The CTV investigation might be unprecedented in police annals for its breadth, complexity and tragedy. The improbability of securing a conviction, or even getting to trial, didn’t mean police shouldn’t try anyway. Even now, outside of court and its reasonable doubt threshold, no summation of what happened and why seems watertight.
‘‘I agree with the decision not to prosecute,’’ Read said, ‘‘I think ultimately that was the right decision on the facts that we had.’’
The case may be over for police, but many families of the victims refuse to let it lie. They have met Justice Minister Andrew Little and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to press for another look at the case and continue to call for accountability. An announcement on their next move is due next week.