In appeal’
designed to keep him sober, which his partner breached by inviting people to their home to drink. He said he ended up drinking too and also smoked methamphetamine, the decision said.
After the guests had left, he got into an argument with Thompson and she led him to understand she might have slept with someone else but refused to say who, the decision said.
He became enraged and attacked her, an action he attributed to the effects of methamphetamine. He estimated the assault would have lasted about 30 minutes with each blow accompanied by the question “Who the f*** is it?”.
He admitted punching her in the head, kicking her “in the guts”, lifting her up off the bed by her hair and throwing her around, but denied ever using the pipe.
He accounted for her blood being on the pipe by saying the police or ESR must have planted it there, the decision said.
The main ground of the application for the appeal to be heard again was the alleged incompetence of Gardiner, his appeal lawyer.
The decision said Te Hiko made numerous allegations including that his lawyer misunderstood and misinterpreted the grounds of appeal and misrepresented them in his submissions.
Te Hiko claimed his lawyer was “inexperienced” and “way out of [his] league”.
However, the decision said regardless of the quality of the oral submissions, the particularised grounds of appeal and the written submissions were detailed and very clear.
“The court was well aware of the arguments which it, for good reasons, considered wholly untenable. The quality of the oral submissions would have had no effect on the outcome of the appeal.”
Justice French said in the decision the judges were not persuaded that Te Hiko’s application for a recall satisfied any of the three prerequisites for recall.
“There has been no fundamental error in the appeal process, let alone one which requires correction in order to avoid a miscarriage of justice.”
They noted Te Hiko had the option to seek the leave of the Supreme Court to appeal.
A lot of hunters were worried there would be no duck shooting season at all this year — so despite an unproductive opening day they were happy to finally get out.
The season got under way on Saturday, delayed by the Covid-19 lockdown and following alert level restrictions, with Eastern Fish and Game expecting smaller duck numbers to be recorded on opening weekend as hunters faced testing conditions.
And while most were well behaved, there were some who had guns seized, were hunting without a licence or dangerous behaviour.
Fish and Game Eastern Region manager Andy Garrick said overall results were a “mixed bag”. While he had heard from Bay of Plenty duck hunters who had a successful weekend, Garrick expects game hunter surveys to reveal a slow opening weekend.
“There are probably a couple of reasons for that. A dry spring followed by a dry autumn is just not conducive to productivity and I think the bird population was depressed as a result of that. You’ve got to have a good breeding season to have a good hunting season,” Garrick said. “The other thing with those dry conditions is a lot of wetlands and farm ponds just don’t have water in them. That makes it hard and on top of that, parts of Bay of Plenty, particularly south of Rotorua and inland, had a lot of fog on Saturday morning.”
Garrick said most hunters in the Eastern region were well behaved.
“We had some incidents where we seized guns. We had a couple of people who didn’t have a hunting licence and a couple of issues with semi-automatic shotguns in which the magazines weren’t restricted.
“We also had an incident with hunting from a boat under power on the Waikato River. We find that really disappointing, it’s obviously a temptation for some but it’s a dangerous pastime as well as not sporting.”
But most were responsible, happy to be out hunting. Among those out hunting was Rotorua’s Shane Leon Wells who took his 5-year-old son Jayden Wells along for the first time. “He loved it, absolutely loved it. I skipped the last two seasons for work and all that but it just seemed to fall into place this year.”