Jailhouse glee at witness downfall
Arthur Taylor says courtroom victory in one of New Zealand’s most notorious double-murder mysteries has sent a chilling message to snitches. By Tony Wall.
A jubilant shout echoes around A-block at Auckland Prison, Paremoremo.
Inmate Arthur Taylor has just heard on the news that a jury has returned a guilty verdict in the perjury trial of ‘‘Witness C’’ in the David Tamihere murder case – a prosecution Taylor had brought from behind bars.
‘‘I yelled out ‘the bastard’s been found guilty’,’’ he laughs. ‘‘The whole wing heard it, ‘cos they’d been waiting too – [the witness] is well known around this prison.’’
In stunning scenes in the High Court at Auckland on Friday afternoon, the jury found the witness guilty of eight counts of perjury relating to testimony he gave 27 years ago at Tamihere’s trial.
It’s believed to be the first successful private prosecution for perjury – certainly the first time such a case has been brought by a serving prisoner.
Taylor, who schooled himself up on the law, took the prosecution because he wanted to send a message to jailhouse snitches: lie, and face the consequences.
Witness C testified that Tamihere had confessed to him that he killed Swedish tourists Urban Hoglin and Heidi Paakkonen in Coromandel bush. He later recanted, saying police had offered him money to tell a fabricated story, but at his trial said the original evidence was true and he’d flip-flopped due to being threatened in jail for being an informant.
In an exclusive audio-recording interview with Stuff , Taylor said he’d been on edge waiting for the jury to come back. ‘‘You can never be confident in a case like this – a jury can do anything. ‘‘I thought ‘oh God I hope the jury’s seen through this bastard’. I was worried there for a while they might not convict him because he’s such a practised liar.
‘‘Your average jury member hasn’t got the skills to pick them up, these people, they’re so manipulative. It’s a victory for the integrity of the justice system.’’
It was a remarkable prosecution, co-ordinated from behind bars by Taylor, with help on the outside from Mike Kalaugher, a private researcher, and author and lawyer Murray Gibson.
Taylor never got to sit through the evidence: ‘‘I wanted to attend ... but Murray convinced me not to. He said they might try and turn it into a trial of you, bring up my past and distract the jury.’’
That past is colourful, to say the least – including a dramatic escape from Auckland Prison in 1998. Taylor is serving a 17-year lag for violence and drugs offences and was turned down for parole earlier this
year. He said a ‘‘massive amount of work’’ went into preparing the perjury case. He had access to a computer room that he’d campaigned for, but no internet.
‘‘The police probably would have spent a quarter of a million dollars preparing a case like this.
‘‘I did what I could on the inside and I had Mike to follow up leads I gave him. He did a damn good job.’’
Taylor said it was ‘‘outrageous’’ that police didn’t prosecute Witness C themselves.
Not only that, but they actively hampered his prosecution, refusing to release documents Taylor wanted to use to show Witness C had a propensity for falsely incriminating people.
‘‘Obviously we couldn’t execute a search warrant ... we had to use the Official Information Act.
‘‘First the police refused our request, then when the Ombudsman asked them to review that decision they sat on it for the best part of a year. We’re still waiting for the statements and are hoping to use them at the sentencing.’’
He said the Parole Board also declined to release information, until the Ombudsman intervened.
Taylor said during his team’s investigations they’d found ‘‘someone far more likely [to be the killer] – he made a deathbed confession to his mother’’.
Tamihere and his lawyers should now go to the Governor-General under the prerogative of mercy provisions of the Crimes Act, Taylor said. ‘‘If the jury in the Tamihere trial had known what we know now, might the verdict have been different? Yes. So he should get a retrial.’’
He’s now focused on Witness C’s sentencing.
‘‘We want to alert the court to his history and try and get name suppression lifted, because he’s an ongoing danger to justice.
‘‘As recently as three years ago in a major murder trial he was touting for business looking to be called as a police witness.’’
What next for the famous ‘‘bush lawyer’’?
Taylor is continuing to fight in the courts for prisoner voting rights, and is looking into the Scott Watson and Rex Haig cases.
But for now, he’s enjoying his win. ‘‘I’d love to be out having a champagne celebration with Mike and Murray. But a couple of the boys up here look after me in the food department, shall we say.’’