Hard News: Veitch
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I'm sure you can understand why the police don't want to go near electoral law issues, though. The party being prosecuted will invariably claim the police have been leaned on and are bowing to political pressure And if you're a top copper it probably pays not to piss the politicians off. Because that pollie you're prosecuting may one day be your boss.
I suspect if there were prosecutions under election law, it wouldn't tend to be the people running, but more their campaign managers and party presidents/executives.
And the police can deal with prosecuting and not prosecuting politicians in other situations (see, drink driving, driving tractors up parliament steps etc), they should be able to do it here.
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Today's library bosses want to spend $70million on a massive and inappropriate rebuilding project that will see much of the collection unavailable for three years and with no guarantee of the safety of the collections or the jobs of the specialist librarians.
This just in. The building redevelopment will still go ahead, but at a significantly reduced cost and with a narrower focus on fixing the building's structural problems and addressing storage. The more grandiose and inappropriate aspects of the redesign will probably go:
The scaled back project would require the design work to be revisited and a fresh resource consent would be sought from Wellington City Council.
Unfortunately, staff and those of us who conduct research there regularly are still going to be seriously inconvenienced, but at least the revised design may be slightly less Arcade Game than a lot of us feared.
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It appears someone thinks it's worth complaining about.
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Good on him.
But last night, Sunday News was told veteran journalist Jock Anderson, a former National Business Review chief reporter, had lodged an "official complaint" with police.
Anderson, now Truth's chief reporter, on Friday posted a letter of complaint to Auckland police, the office of the solicitor general and the Auckland Law Society alleging the letters from Devoy and Currie were not presented to the court in the way they were initially written.
"I am complaining as a citizen of New Zealand and as a citizen that the integrity of the court has been damaged by altered character references given to the judge when sentencing Veitch," he said.
Veitch's spokeswoman Glenda Hughes did not return calls from Sunday News last night.
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Sounds like a sad and cynical stunt by a tatty (or should that be "titty"?) newspaper to breathe more life into the sordid affair.
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Sounds like a sad and cynical stunt
Perhaps Scott, but it is interesting to see how interpretations of the law are addressed. I, for measley one, are always interested to know how the Police do respond to issues like this because.....well, it's knowledge bro.
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Oh look...
"I lashed out..."
Quite a few times akshully.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/2427247/Tony-Veitch-police-file-released
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Quite a few times akshully.
I wish it had gone to trial. It really ain't ok to just hope for a better outcome next time.
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I am surprised that this is the kind of document that can be obtained through the freedom of information act. Surely if the allegations cannot be tested in court it means that Veitch cannot defend them, and as such they shouldn't become public?
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I am surprised that this is the kind of document that can be obtained through the freedom of information act. Surely if the allegations cannot be tested in court it means that Veitch cannot defend them, and as such they shouldn't become public?
I tend to agree. On the other hand, there's an element of natural justice I feel is served by doing so.
Curly one tho...
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Surely if the allegations cannot be tested in court it means that Veitch cannot defend them, and as such they shouldn't become public?
Yeah, it really should be innocent until proven otherwise. The court of public opinion has shown many here time and time again to be faulty. Maybe documents like these should be destroyed if not used.
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Veitch's lawyer should have (and maybe did) advise him that the documentation might be released.
If he'd denied the allegations and let them go to trial, he'd have had a chance to refute them in front of a jury, wouldn't he?
It strikes me that the prosecution were pretty lenient in letting allegations of that level of seriousness be plea-bargained away.
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He is still innocent until proven otherwise. No court is going to retry him, except that of public opinion. His freedom's not at stake at the public's hands, and he has every right still to defend himself in the court of public opinion. I wonder what this Sunday's paper will look like.
The police hold that info back before a trial so as not to prejudice it. If there's not going to be a trial (double jeopardy and all) then there's no reason to withhold that info.
He's got the right to challenge the release of the info under defamation law, but of course truth is a defence to defamation.
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He's got the right to challenge the release of the info under defamation law, but of course truth is a defence to defamation.
As I just said on t'other thread.
Nice.
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Surely if the allegations cannot be tested in court it means that Veitch cannot defend them, and as such they shouldn't become public?
He's perfectly free to contest the accuracy of any of the material released, though it looks like someone had a rush of well-oxygenated blood to the head and said "This time, Tony, you're going to STFU and stay that way."
Last time I looked, "it might be embarrasing or inconvenient to various persons" was a ground not to release under the OIA. (Though there sure are some sections of the public service who have turned pulling imaginary yet convenient clauses of the Privacy Act out of their arses.)
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What a vicious little creep. Even now though, compare the Herald's somewhat sanitised versions with the DominionPost's.
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Reading a more fullsome account, I wonder why more of Vetich's actions weren't prosecuted but that's a matter for the Police. Certainly this list proves the lie that he was otherwise a nice bloke.
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Not proved as such. But I suppose it means that the Police believed Kristen Dunne-Powell enough (and presumably found sufficient evidence) to echo her claims in their statement - relatively forcefully, from what little we've been quoted.
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Earlier, spokesmutt Hughes said our boy Tony was quietly getting on with things. But now it seems his team don't want the public hearing any more upsetting details after all.
Tony Veitch's lawyers today blocked the publication of material from a police file news media had obtained under the Official Information Act.
His lawyers got an interim High Court injunction preventing disclosure from the file, which related to the recent prosecution of the former broadcaster.
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The order prevents police from disclosing the contents of the file to "any person", and any further publication of details by news organisations.
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More to the point, did Kristin Dunne-Powell get any say in the decision to publish?
Why would she? She's not a member of the police force or an editor of a major daily newspaper.
If a department were asked for a file like that under the OIA, it might ask itself whether the release of the information would breach the privacy of individuals, and make a call to the person quoted in the file to see if they were ok with its release as a matter of courtesy. Or it might not bother, given that the duty is to release unless there's a good reason not to. That's a question for the Police and the Ombudsman, but I'd imagine that there's a pretty strong overriding public interest in the transparency of the justice system. The defence team would have had that file for a long time as part of the discovery process.
Using the powers of my imagination again, I can't see any journalist worthy of that name acquiring a document like that and not publishing as much of it as they could. I doubt they'd be needing any encouragement or asking anything of anyone other than "would you care to make any more comment before I print this?". They'd have been wise not to bother with the latter, given they've now been injuncted.
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Oh, and something else also occurred to me: If Veitch feels the publication of detail from the Police file is in breech of standards regarding accuracy, balance and fairness he has exactly the same recourse to the Press Council and Broadcasting Standards Authority as everyone else. No more, but certainly no less.
As far as I'm aware, every story so far has included an invitation for him or a representative to respond -- so I think it would be a little hard to claim he's the victim of a one-sided media gang bang.
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I'd also respectfully suggest that some of the usual suspect (who I won't reward with linkage), should think very carefully about using terms like "blackmailer" and "extortionist" to describe Dunne-Powell. If that doesn't meet the legal standard for defamation, it's hard to imagine what would.
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Not proved as such. But I suppose it means that the Police believed Kristen Dunne-Powell enough (and presumably found sufficient evidence) to echo her claims in their statement - relatively forcefully, from what little we've been quoted.
Bart, I think it is proved that Vetich is not the nice guy who snapped he claims to be. Unless you believe "proof" can only occur in criminal courts?
This information can be both correct and still not the subject of a criminal prosecution. I don't know why the Police didn't charge him with these acts, but unless and until the publication is challenged, I think it's reasonable to believe that it's true and therefore, Vetich's assault on Ms Dunne Powell was not one-off, but just the last in a series of assaults.
The plea bargain process doesn't invalidate claims, it just determines which will be the subject of criminal prosecutions.
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Ahem, me not Bart, trying to be a little reasonable and learn from our heated debate on that earlier Veitch thread. Please accept that I think he is a scumbag in no uncertain terms, and his claims that it was a one-off rather than a nasty streak are not credible.
I meant that all we have seen published yesterday is from Dunne-Powell's statement to the Police, and the Police prosecution statement to the Court based on that and their investigations.
I believe many would regard "proof" as a pretty strong statement of certainty, though I'm not denying on balance most of us might believe the claims to be true as published.
There's a reasonable assumption that the Police statement wouldn't include things they believed were likely to be untrue. However, a court process would test those claims and we were denied one by the plea bargain. That's all.
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And he's back; starting in January.
Always suspicious of announcements like this made on 23rd December.
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