Suddenly Scott Watson has one success after another.

After 24 years of false imprisonment, Scott Watson is stringing one success together after another. Although progress has been too slow rectifying injustices in New Zealand has always been pointedly slow. That is an absolutely shameful situation and senior police as recently as 2017 were still saying that Scott was guilty. Now they are silent perhaps considering that their "gut instinct" on which they built their false case has finally been destroyed or revealed for what it is - criminal behaviour.

They deserve to go to prison.

But for now, looking back at the tide change it was something around 100 pages of submissions and many links to supporting material found by a lay person, helped by many people that was the first strike using an ancient process to correct legal processes - The Royal Prerogative of Mercy (RPOM). It took 3 years or so and unfairly for Scott not all the material on hand was considered or he might have been out of prison by now. However, his plea for the first time in 20 years was accepted, having failed in the NZ Courts and even in the British Privy Council.

By then other work had continued to the point Scott now has a growing list of new witnesses who police deliberately ignored, changed or destroyed their statements which in total would have exonerated Scott or indeed with an honest investigation seen Scott never charged with perhaps the real truth of the case discovered. A detective who appears to have done a lot of the dirty work, Tom Fitzgerald, was recently blasted in a Court of Appeal (COA) decision for the deceitful manner in which he misused the Law in other cases. At this stage, the police hierarchy is sticking with him but we will see how long that lasts.

What the COA has yet to consider is that Fitzgerald not only managed to get false confessions or at least illegal ones, but he also bullied witnesses into lying either by threats or promises. The Watson case is littered not only with sightings of the mystery ketch hidden by police but also by witnesses who changed their stories which were kept secret from the Court.

Where once the hair "evidence" was said to be impeachable it is now just a mess of confusion and more likely deliberate falsification. Whilst the fight to have the whole case properly examined and understood after Scott is freed with people brought to account will continue, recently another glaring picture of deceit has been confirmed. Scott has been denied parole after flawed departmental reports were given to the Parole Board. He has been in prison for years when he should have been paroled and fighting his case with his freedom already intact. That too must be remedied. NZ's system of Parole is a flawed mess, Corrections has the largest financial allowance of any government agency and it has built a network of preposterous mumbo jumbo which brings us to another recent victory for Scott. He has been for years wrongly assessed as a high risk. That resulted from the use of wrong data then copied by one miscreant after another, possibly deliberately in some cases, that too must be remedied and will be.

Scott may soon have another Parole hearing with the truth on the table as to who he really is as a person, while relatively early next year his case will be back in Court and he will win. I hope by then the Crown has backed off from the hidden and changed evidence, the witnesses who lied either under immense pressure from police or for reward.

Overall it is shameful how long it takes to free innocent people and that will require work in the future. I hope part of that will be a routine investigation into the police or forensic scientists involved in a particular case, it is they after all who are the most responsible for false imprisonment.