LAWYER’S HIGHS AND LOWS

Public defender Keith Jefferies has represented drug dealers, rapists, killers – and even a victim of police brutality. But his dubious claim to fame came in 2013 when he suggested a young Wellington rape victim ‘‘could have closed her legs’’. Bouncer George Pule got nine years’ prison after a jury found him guilty of raping the drunk woman in an alleyway. Jefferies had told the 2013 trial jury ‘‘all she would have had to do was to close her legs . . . it’s as simple as that’’. ‘‘Why didn’t she do that? . . . The reason she didn’t do that was because the sex was consensual, as easy as that." Wellington Rape Crisis labelled the lawyer’s comments ‘‘disgusting’’ and an example of ‘‘victim blaming rhetoric’’. While facing drugs charges himself, Jefferies was defending a client in a high-profile P case. He defended a woman who lived at an opulent Chews Lane apartment being used as a base for a multimillion-dollar methamphetamine operation, only metres from the Wellington Central Police Station. Jefferies also acted for young Wellingtonian Jakob Christie, whose neck was broken by police in an illegal and violent break up of a Khandallah house party in 2009 when he was 19. Police took three years to investigate Christie’s claims of assault by police, and their delays and mistakes in the process were ‘‘inexcusable’’, the Independent Police Conduct Authority found in 2013. In 2012, the lawyer defended a landmark case – a Wellington woman was accused of using methamphetamine while breastfeeding. The charge was later dropped. In 2008, he defended a skinhead who tried to influence a juror by leaving a note with the words ‘‘not guilty’’ and a swastika on their doorstep. He previously represented an axe murder who escaped briefly from the old Wellington Prison at Mt Crawford.