The Watson case in a perfect Justice system?

One of the things Parole requires is a perfect Justice system that makes no mistakes. We need not look far to see that New Zealand does not have a perfect justice system. The awakening to that fact was the Thomas case and unfortunately, there have been many such cases of false convictions since that time. Things did not get better, any steps to improve were slow and outpaced by changes that made things worse.

In recent years public opinion has been polled as to unsafe convictions in various cases and Scott Watson's case was one of those felt to be an unsafe conviction by the majority of those polled, in fact, he was believed to be innocent by that majority. So how does the Parole system react to prisoners who may be innocent? Well, firstly they don't recognise such a situation as even being possible. The other side of that is the public record shows long-term convictions being overturned relatively regularly. Surely those 2 things can be reconciled in some way, particularly for someone like Scott who is way past his minimum parole period, a long-term low-security prisoner who "works outside the wire."

But unfortunately in this enlightened time, there may be no way forward for some innocent prisoners who literally confirm they will never agree that they are guilty. There is no advantage achieved by a prisoner doing that, in fact, it will result in them serving longer sentences, in some cases possibly never being released.

The real flaw however may be that the Parole Boards don't budge on that, or in fact have a stated protocol by which they could deal with inmates such as Pora, Hall, Maney, and Tamihere some of who have cases still active within the "system." The writer is aware of times when the Board depending on its chairman or members might resolve such an issue by either instinct, a sense of fairness, or indeed an objective take on how much time the person has served, how they behave, etc but never forgetting that in NZ an innocent person could die in prison for denying guilt.

There are a few objective possibilities that could make things fairer for those wrongfully convicted, a release of information to either the Attorney General or some office such as the Ombudsman of new evidence found their cases that give their claims credibility, alternatively long term behaviour both of which are favourable in Scott's case with the former indeed being compelling.

In the meantime, Scott Watson's fight for Justice continues with the odds of his innocence improving daily.