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The case against Michael Reed
By Steven | July 9, 2010
Michael Reed QC, Morning Report on Wednesday:
The jury were completely convinced that David hadn’t done it.
This betrays either a gob-smacking ignorance of fundamental principles of criminal law, or an intention to mislead the public about the significance of a not-guilty verdict.
Fortunately, one of the Bain jurors seems to understand the law better than Reed, as demonstrated in this letter to the Christchurch Press last month:
As a member of David Bain’s retrial jury, I am angered by the misinterpretation of our not-guilty verdict by the public, and particularly by the media. In an article in The New Zealand Herald, shortly after the retrial verdict last June, Paul Holmes wrote: ‘‘David Bain is innocent. Robin Bain came in from the caravan that cold Monday morning and killed four sleeping members of his family, then himself.’’
This type of conclusion has been repeated many times in the year since the trial finished. Even in Friday’s Press article about an upcoming play about the murder case, Katie Chapman states that Bain’s ‘‘defence successfully argued that Robin was the killer’’. I take exception to this flawed characterisation of David Bain’s not-guilty verdict. As a jury, we did not necessarily find David innocent or Robin guilty. Our task was to determine if David Bain’s guilt was proved beyond reasonable doubt – a very high threshold. Anyone who reads from our verdict that Robin Bain is guilty is just plain wrong. Robin Bain was not on trial – David was.
Good on RNZ’s Monique Devereux for making this point.
Incidentally, this also rather suggests that there are occasions on which it is valuable to hear from jurors after a verdict, despite the hard line taken on this issue by many judges.
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