“Joe Karam” — an editorial published by The Dominion Post

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Editorial: Triumph of the prickly crusader

The Dominion Post | 5:00AM - Tuesday, 09 June 2009



Prickly, controlling, obsessive.

Former All Black Joe Karam has been all of those things in his crusade to free David Bain, the Dunedin student convicted 14 years ago of the murders of his parents and three siblings.

Mr Karam's intolerance of alternative points of view has been apparent whenever anyone has questioned his version of what occurred in a rundown home in Dunedin's Every Street on June 20, 1994. His determination to control events has been just as apparent, no more so than when he and Mr Bain emerged from the High Court at Christchurch on Friday after Mr Bain was acquitted on all five counts of murder. "Don't answer him, don't answer him," Mr Karam muttered under his breath to the taller, balding, bespectacled man at his side when a reporter asked how he felt. "We'll answer when we're ready."

And his pursuit of the case has cost him hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars as well as relationships. "There was a long period in the late 90s and the first few years of this century when there was no conversation to be had with Joe that was not about David Bain," broadcaster, and friend, Paul Holmes wrote in a weekend column.

But it is precisely because of those qualities that Mr Bain walked from the High Court at Christchurch a free man. Without Mr Karam's intervention he would still be doing time in Paparua Prison.

The verdict does not mean Mr Bain did not kill his family. Only he knows for certain what occurred on the day of the killings. But it does means there was insufficient evidence to convict him.

For that, Mr Karam deserves the gratitude not just of Mr Bain but of everyone. The legal system must stand up to scrutiny.

The key moment in his 13-year campaign came in 2007 when the the Privy Council quashed Mr Bain's convictions and ruled "a substantial miscarriage of justice has actually occurred".

Some, including Mr Bain's lawyer, Michael Reed, QC, argue that this should have been the end of the matter. Millions of dollars have been wasted on the Crown and defence cases, he says.

That is not correct. The Privy Council did not find Mr Bain not guilty. It simply ruled that the Court of Appeal had exceded its brief when it concluded that evidence which became available after the original trial would not have changed the minds of the jurors who convicted Mr Bain. The issue of guilt was one for a properly informed and directed jury to consider.

That has now occurred. Mr Bain has been acquitted and Mr Karam vindicated. The latter has won almost as many detractors as admirers for his dogged pursuit of the case, but there would be few who would not welcome his aid if they found themselves convicted of a crime they did not commit.

His name will go down in legal history alongside those of Pat Booth the crusading Auckland Star journalist who campaigned for seven years to have Arthur Allan Thomas acquitted of the murders of Jeanette and Harvey Crewe and journalist Donna Chisholm, scientist Arie Geursen and lawyer Murray Gibson the trio who secured the release of David Dougherty, a man who was wrongly convicted of raping an 11-year-old neighbour.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/opinion/editorials/2483079/Editorial-Triumph-of-the-prickly-crusader

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

I reckon Joe Karam deserves a knighthood.

I would find that prospect a hillariously funny, yet ironic concept.

Imagine it....the sort of people who support NZ re-adopting a medieval and imperial honours system are also the sort of people who would totally and absolutely froth at the mouth if Joe Karam got to put Sir in front of his name.

I think I might have to write a letter to the Editor of the Dominion Post suggesting a knighthood for Joe Karam.

I wonder if they'd have the balls to publish it? 

[Newtown-Fella]

I reckon Joe Karam deserves a knighthood.

I would find that prospect a hillariously funny, yet ironic concept.

Imagine it....the sort of people who support NZ re-adopting a medieval and imperial honours system are also the sort of people who would totally and absolutely froth at the mouth if Joe Karam got to put Sir in front of his name.

I think I might have to write a letter to the Editor of the Dominion Post suggesting a knighthood for Joe Karam.

I wonder if they'd have the balls to publish it? 

will that letter be before or after you have received you knoghthood ....

im sure train passengers would feel good knowing they were being transported my a Sir and not just a plain old Mr ....

[Magoo]

Sir Throttle has a certain ring to it. 

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

There was a chap living up in Gisborne before I left there who had Sir in front of his name, but he put it there as his FIRST NAME by changing his name by deed poll. He kept his existing name, but just added the name Sir in front of it.

He was a drug smuggler. I can't remember all the details off the top of my head, but his yacht (the Lonebird) was intercepted by either the NZ or the Aussie navy and it was full of cocaine if I remember correctly. I seem to recall he ended up in jail in Australia.

His legal name after the change by deed poll was Sir Thomas Graham Fry.

[Magoo]

From Lonebird to jailbird.   Breaks your heart doesn't it. 
He obviously held himself in high regard.

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/news_world_story_skin/64127

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

A lot of people claimed the Lonebird was the mystery ketch in the Smart/Hope case which resulted in Scott Watson being convicted and jailed for murder. Who knows....there were certainly a lot of rumours in Gisborne though.

[Magoo]

I bet they thought they were home and hosed when they got that  close to Australia.

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Bain: Now for the next verdict

By PAT BOOTH - Stuff.co.nz | 5:00AM - Tuesday, 16 June 2009



                 PAT BOOTH

Joe Karam is the deserving public hero in the Bain case.

His single-minded determination, his energy over those 13 years, reopened a tightly-closed case, battling the resources and the implacable stubbornness of the justice machine and winning.

It’s a process Dr Jim Sprott and I know all about and will never forget. Nor will Arthur Thomas.

But three other virtually anonymous key figures are hidden away in the seeming millions of words written and spoken on the Bain affair in recent days. With many more to come.

So three old-fashioned cheers for the three.

But don’t expect the do-away-with-the-lords clique to join in. Actually they will be stricken speechless when I list the three by name and title.

Here goes:

Baron Hoffman of Chedworth;

Lord Richard Scott of Foscote — both of these worthies are South African-born;

Baron Jonathon Mance.

Think what that’s doing to those among us who are still trying to adjust their blood pressure after the reintroduction of sirs and dames.

Now they’re having to cope with two barons and a lord and how they did the right thing.

Because that’s exactly what the three did.

They heard and acted on the old facts and the new evidence over the conviction of David Bain.

Which is more than was done by the string of legal but sometimes closed minds which make up our independent, non-colonialist, total-free-rule-for-Aotearoa justice process.

Those three fresh minds in London put aside any risk of prejudice to tell the New Zealand system — whose advocates apparently believe themselves and other key figures to be infallible — that they should look again at the Bain conviction, that the three-week trial may have got it wrong in 1995.

They used the words “substantial miscarriage of justice”.

The three wise men did not intend it, but at the same time they made a powerful case for the return of the right to appeal to the Privy Council as part of our legal process.

Here were minds from a much wider community than ours, without the risk of their assessment being tainted by all that has gone before, an opinion unswayed by New Zealand Court of Appeal decisions, by police internal investigations and failed defamation cases brought by police involved.

It was a hearing free of cosy brothers-in-the-law, being-staunch-for-the-system factors which obstructed the Bain campaign as they did for a decade 30 years ago in the Thomas case.

I don’t want to risk appearing to slip-stream Joe Karam’s days of glory with unnecessary recall of other times. Nothing can do that.

But his historic success once again underscores what I have always seen as the value of the Privy Council — and the loss involved in the last government’s decision to scrap the London law lords as our final legal backstop.

When a Muldoon-generated pardon for Arthur Thomas left the way clear for a Royal Commission, it took the commissioners, Judge Robert Taylor, a stroppy retired Australian judge, former Anglican Archbishop Allen Johnstone and onetime senior National Cabinet minister John Gordon to accept totally what had been obvious for years.

Eleven New Zealand judges at various hearings had failed to recognise that Arthur Thomas was innocent and had been wrongly convicted and jailed because investigating police framed him, manufactured and planted evidence and withheld facts which would have been valuable to his defence.

That’s what those other three wise men said in their 1980 Royal Commission report. They used words like “unspeakable outrage”.

A justice system fighting to defend its processes over Thomas had earlier cleverly sidestepped a Privy Council ruling like the Bain decision.

And that in itself unwittingly highlighted just why the law lords were and still are necessary.

“Deeply concerned” by my original investigation in the Auckland Star, the then Minister of Justice, Dr Martyn Finlay, promised a new Court of Appeal hearing on the new evidence.

Predictably, that court — including a chief justice and a Court of Appeal chairman who had previously given Thomas the thumbs down — said that no further action was necessary.

That was the stage when — like Joe Karam and the Bain team — we flew off to the Privy Council only to discover a legal fish hook which I believe was deliberately buried in the original advice the Ministry of Justice had given Dr Finlay.

In asking for “an opinion” from the Court of Appeal and not a judgement, the clever draftsmen had covertly moved the process out of the law lords’ jurisdiction.

While expressing some surprise at features of the Thomas case, the lords told us, in effect, that their job was to examine verdicts not opinions.

We repacked our briefcases and flew home after an expensive and frustrating wild goose chase.

A question 30 years on to the government which so recently rejected Labour’s politically-correct scrapping of knighthoods: Is anyone in the Beehive “deeply concerned” enough about the Bain finding to now do the obvious, go further and reinstate the right to a Privy Council hearing?

And, is there also a case for introduction of the old Scottish verdict of not proven?

You be the judge.

PS: Want another crusade Joe? Well someone in the Privy Council system is looking for a knight in shining armour like yours.

British media is mighty intrigued because Mary McDonald, 50, registrar of the judicial committee of the Privy Council — who strangely and in very English fashion takes her parrot to work at the law lords’ Downing Street office — has been suspended and put on gardening leave from her $250,000 job on a “disciplinary matter”.

Sounds like another call for Karam.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/opinion/2501389/Bain-Now-for-the-next-verdict

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Karam begins third Bain book

By GREER MCDONALD - The Dominion Post | 9:02AM - Friday, 26 June 2009



SUBJECT AND AUTHOR: David Bain and Joe Karam,
who says his upcoming book will address recent
comments. — DEAN KOZANIC/The Press.

The third book based on the David Bain murder trial to be written by Joe Karam will "set the record straight" on any misinformation, the long-time campaigner says.

The as-yet-untitled book, which Mr Karam says he began writing this week, was confirmed after HarperCollins approached him about writing a book following the trial.

Mr Bain was found guilty of the 1994 murders of five of his family members and spent almost 13 years in jail.

His original conviction was quashed in 2007 and he was found not guilty at a retrial early this month.

The book is due to be released in September.

Mr Karam has previously written two books about the case - David and Goliath in 1997 and Bain and Beyond in 2000.

He also produced a 40-page "pamphlet", Innocent!: Seven critical flaws in the wrongful conviction of David Bain, in 2001.

Combined, Mr Karam's "best estimate" was that more than 50,000 copies of those books had sold.

News of the latest book coincided with figures released by UMR Research yesterday showing fewer people now believe David Bain is not guilty than immediately after the trial.

"That 15 per cent drop in the number of New Zealanders who believe that David Bain is not guilty is almost certainly attributable to media stories on inappropriate juror behaviour and testimony that did not reach the Christchurch jury," the company said.

Mr Karam said the reasons for the drop — which included a 9 per cent increase in people who were "unsure" — were "fairly obvious".

"Since the verdicts, there has been a considerably vast amount of comment on all sorts of issues, which have largely remained unanswered.

"There have been a lot of negative headlines from David's point of view. There were some pretty seriously, what I would describe as ill-informed, major analyses written by people who clearly believe that David is guilty."

Mr Karam told The Dominion Post yesterday: "This book I'm writing is going to set a lot of this stuff straight."

HarperCollins spokeswoman Sandra Noakes said the company had high hopes for sales of the book but would not confirm how much Mr Karam's contract was worth.

Meanwhile, Mr Karam said Mr Bain was "very good". "He's in Auckland, pottering around and getting himself organised."

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/2537485/Karam-begins-third-Bain-book

[ballasted moth]

 Hope Karam will have A CHAPTER ON JURY MANIPULATION
More and more believe Bain to be guilty

[Magoo]

Hope Karam will have A CHAPTER ON JURY MANIPULATION
More and more believe Bain to be guilty

In what way were the jury manipulated.       One was sleeping when he wasn't giggling and passing notes to another one so probably wouldn't have noticed any manipulation. 

[Crusader]

I didn't realise the courhouse was that packed out there BM during the trial. As only those who sat through the entire proceedings would be the ones with the correct knowledge to form an opinion. Any other opinion is just plain bigotry.