Today, it’s a no-brainer that Alan Hall was wrongfully convicted of the 1985 murder of Arthur Easton and of wounding his son Brendan. Why it took so long and whether we will pause to learn the inherent lessons are important questions.
The prosecution case had multiple problems, the most alarming being changes to an eyewitness’s statement without his knowledge. In its unaltered form, the statement would have meant Hall, a Pākehā, could not have been the man the witness saw the night Easton died of stab wounds in his Papakura home.
In the altered version, the witness’s emphatic description of the offender as Māori was removed and an assertion was added that the witness had identified a sweatshirt from Hall’s home as the one worn by the man