What has changed in the Watson case?

Here's a list of why I think Scott Watson should be retried, I'm sure there others I've overlooked.  Feel welcome to send details.

1/ Rozz McNeilly a shift Manager of the Furneaux Lodge no longer positively identifies Watson as being with Olivia in the bar. She says she was tricked by police in identifying Watson and realised this later.

2/ Guy Wallace no longer positively identifies taking Watson and the couple to board a boat together in the early hours of new year's day. Guy says that he was tricked or mistaken in his belief the man with the couple was Watson. McNeilly and Wallace no longer put the couple together with Watson, and even more importantly together going onto Watson's yacht.

3/ A couple are now identified (I don't know if they gave evidence at the trial) who were rafted to Watson's boat the Blade and others when he came aboard in the small hours looking to party and proposed to the woman's partner that she might spend some time with him. The vessel was The Blanco, at the  this time according to the Crown's sequence of events, Olivia and Ben were either dead or alive on The Blade when Watson anticipated going with the woman on the Blanco back to The Blade where the couple were. This is a major and serious flaw in the Crown case. I don't know whether it has been touched on before, but when added to evidence now favouring Watson it points to him being innocent.

4/The mystery ketch of this case may now have been identified as the Alliance, however there are other, what would be new witnesses, that saw 2 ketches at the same time (one being the Alliance) soon after the disappearances - providing the possibility that the mystery ketch seen at the same time as the Alliance had the couple on board or  that they had been on board some time earlier. The second unnamed ketch was seen by several witnesses whose recollections appear clear and bring another new dimension to the case that was not heard at the trial.

5/A witness saw a person on a ketch (not the Alliance), after the couple's disappearance, that he believes was Olivia. This wasn't a drunk person at the Lodge, but someone out on the water following new year's eve. His evidence is also new, and material.

6/ 2 hairs lifted from a blanket from the Blade and said to belong to Olivia are now identified as being from the same hereditary line as Olivia's mother. In other words they could have belonged to either Olivia or her sister. Whilst they were not found on a first thorough search in the Laboratory, the 2 hairs were found in a subsequent search on the same day that a hair brush belonging to Olivia's sister was delivered to the lab. The 2 hairs were later found to be contaminated from other contact. There is now evidence to say that the contamination could have happened by the brush being used by the 2 sisters, probably not an unusual event in a household. It's important to note that a/ there was absolutely no other evidence found on the blanket, or indeed the Blade, which linked to the missing couple, and b/ that I do not know the laboratory practice techniques employed reached an international standard that ensured no possibility of cross contamination of the hairs within the lab.

7/ A witness who claimed Scott Watson 'confessed' to murdering the couple and who gave disgusting details of the crime has recanted. The NZ police are now unable to find this witness, however his evidence still stands like that of other witnesses above as indicting Watson when that no longer is the case.

8/ A recent book by Ian Wishart, which I apparently 'fisked,' what ever that term means, exposed (possibly inadvertently by IW) that identifications of Watson and a second person who may have been in contact with the couple in the bar are horribly compromised. This is supported by what Wallace and McNeilly now say. Along with another witness who saw Watson after the couple's disappearance when Watson was allegedly trying to hide and disguise his boat, Watson waved out to him. It must be remembered that Watson never denied being in the bar, there is no suggestion he had disguised himself in anyway, while in fact there are clear indications he drew attention to himself as did many others that night in a confusing flux.

9/ Also, thanks to Wishart's book Elementary, we now know that Watson had intended to paint his boat long before he eventually did after the couples disappearance. What is also apparent, and which wasn't appreciated by myself before reading Elementary, is that Watson was well known to police in the Sounds, and consequently therefore to the locals there. None of those locals identified Watson at the Bar.

10/ 'Secret tapes' exposed by Wishart into conversations held in the Watson household show the family did not believe that the couple had disappeared and thought they would turn up again. The tapes also show that a PI hired by the family asked questions that on the face it looked like they may have been questions the police were interested in knowing the answers too. The tapes, which arguably should not have been revealed by Wishart are now material to the fact that the Watson family firmly believed the couple were not dead. They did not, as has been implied, look to cover for Watson but certainly were concerned about the attention he was receiving as a suspect.

Some of the material above was included in the application by Watson for exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy. When that application was turned down, and the findings made public it was revealed that the investigator of the application looked at all the points favouring Watson individually before dismissing them - presumably in doing so relying on other points of the application to do so. So where the supporting evidence may have failed to cross threshold of bringing doubt upon Watson's conviction, it was seen as supporting evidence in refusing the application.That reviewer, Kristy McDonald, never looked at the points in continuity, that is a Miscarriage of Justice. It is a requirement in practice for items of pivotal importance in a case to be looked at individually and then collectively. What surrounds weak or strong evidence is to be viewed as to whether it adds or reduces weight to the evidence. That was never done in a way consistent with due process and fairness, let alone using a word never used in the finding, with Mercy.

I think even a pessimist sold on Watson's guilt can acknowledge that points above (including others that I may have missed) are matters for a Jury to decide the individual and collective weight and therefore should have been referred to the NZ Court of Appeal as the legislation allows. The Watson conviction is weakened on many fronts by new material that stands alone, and in sequence, in a manner which undermines the validity of his conviction. Some single points appear to tip the balance in Watson's favour as unfairly standing convicted, but it is the overall continuity of a number of points which fully turn the tide against the convictions to a point of requiring a retrial.

Scott Watson RPOM Report - Some general impressions.

First of all in this report in response to an Exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy made by Scott Watson to the Crown is the number of 'blanked' out names. The report is a now made public and it is difficult not to notice how many of the details of witnesses, or potential witnesses, are kept secret, fairly unprecedented in a society that takes pride in 'open Justice.'

Of course the most 'secrecy' appears to surround the evidence and recantations of prison inmates, in particular the troubled prisoner 'Secret Witness A.' It is clear that the author of the report Kristy McDonald QC had an extreme difficulty in 'stepping back' to consider this and other evidence in an overall context of the case against Watson. I must note that SWA has made contradictory statements to the point that he must be considered totally unreliable. It can't be forgotten that SWA was an important Crown Witness who put a 'confession' into the mouth of Scott Watson, a confession that must have had an impact on Watson's Jury. Now however SWA will no longer co-operate with The Crown, who despite that fact still 'stand by their man.' McDonald QC interestingly enough, saw her mandate as only able to consider new and fresh evidence, accordingly it would be appear to the uninitiated that it is new evidence that SWA no longer stands by his earlier evidence or indeed by The Crown. By the record produced of the contact attempts by Ms Mc Donald it is revealed that the troubled SWA still maintains a lifestyle as a criminal and perhaps unfortunately for him, the same mental health problems. Reading some of the claims by SWA, my opinion is that they are bizarre and untruthful and that he no longer is willing to support them is in itself 'fresh' evidence favouring Watson. If the 'confession' to SWA is a cornerstone of upholding the conviction of Watson The Crown case is obviously in serious trouble, was from the outset when police needed to rely on evidence from prison inmates, this one in particular having mental health issues.

Moving onto another 'cornerstone' of the evidence against Watson is the 'identification' of him the morning of the disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope. Reading the report the identification is frankly a mess, yet Ms McDonald dutifully holds it together. She in fact says that neither Guy Wallace or Roz McNeilly properly identified Watson and that was put to the Jury at the Trial by the Defence. She observes, on one issue forwarded by Watson, that both McNeilly and Wallace would not have identified, by their own admission now, Watson as the person the Jury were asked by the Crown to believe was Watson drinking in the bar that night, and later 'seen' leaving the wharf with the deceased couple. She says that the defence case was put to the Jury of non identification and that 'dock identification' of Watson that the witnesses now say they couldn't have made is unreliable. Hold on folks, the Jury obviously accepted the identification of Watson, clouded as it was, and having heard either witness tell them that Watson wasn't the person about whom they were giving evidence would have resulted in a dramatic and telling point in their deliberations, one that can't be escaped. It needs to also be noted that Ms McNeilly is now able to say that the person she served in the bar that night had no missing fingers, whereas Watson does. Effectively she would now be able to say Watson wasn't the 'mystery' man and that the 'mystery' man had no fingers missing, in fact able to give a good description of his hands.

In all fairness to The Crown they had identification problems, they had/have credibility problems with their witnesses. On that point there are witnesses whose evidence was 'allowed' as to the propensity of Watson to 'talk about' killing people, women in particular. 'Propensity evidence', also that of 'prisoners' and unreliable identification are all hallmarks of a weak prosecution, one which is striving to fill the gaps. In this case despite the 'propensity evidence' at least one witness was a former girlfriend of Watson whom apparently had nothing to offer in support of his propensity to murder, let alone to be violent.

A few weeks ago I wrote on the interactive blog Kiwi Blog that both the Minster of Justice and Ms McDonald had effectively hung their hats on the dna evidence of 2 hairs 'found' on a blanket taken from Watson's boat The Blade. The report reveals that the 2 hairs were no actually found on 2 earlier ESR searches rather than a single previous search that I mistakenly observed. So 2 searches and no 2 hairs. What I've now read is that our own Court of Appeal has commented on those 2 hairs and the controversy surrounding them in that they were part of a 'contaminated' mix pointed out by a commentator here a couple of days ago on the previous Watson thread. The COA refers to the 'matched' DNA profile as ' not explained by the dna mixed hairs.' On the surface a 'commanding' observation until viewed with a more neutral and open mind that allows the equal 'commanding'' observation that the importance of the 2 hairs (more about them shortly) is not explained by the 'contaminated' hair. If the first does not explain the second, then the second can not explain the first and that falls in favour of reasonable doubt about the importance of the evidence, the sanctity of it, and also the passage by which it travelled to that blanket only to be overlooked twice.

So as to those 2 crucial hairs one cannot help but note the language, which, on this point, Kristy McDonald is guarded - she uses the term 'strongly supported.' Not conclusive, without doubt, beyond doubt or absolutely proven. She relies on 'strongly supported.' On each and every turn Kristy McDonald avoids the 'overall' and highly visible picture between the lines of her report - as late Lord Diplock of the Privy Council has observed... “mercy is not the subject of legal rights [but] begins where legal rights end.'

If Watson legal rights have indeed ended, and if the Royal Prerogative of Mercy is so lifeless and blind then it can be said that a man unidentified by critical Crown witnesses as being in the company of Hope and Smart, whose ability to be a 'boy friend' of at least one woman who was unable to confirm is propensity to violence, let alone murder, whose confession was 'sung loud' by a crippled minded prisoner who is reported to have since said the police didn't look after him, and whom now abandons his master, is held in prison on the evidence of 2 mysteriously appearing hairs, uncontaminated by their contaminated environment.