A convicted sex offender, who has pursued every available legal avenue to have his convictions overturned, has avoided being declared a vexatious litigant.
In an interim decision, High Court judges Justices Hugh Williams and David Baragwananth have ordered that Graham Robert Ashley Palmer cease issuing any further civil proceedings until they deliver their final judgment.
Cases of people being declared vexatious litigants are extraordinarily rare.
Palmer is serving preventive detention after being convicted of the sexual violation of a 15-year-old girl in Auckland in 1999. He was earlier convicted of indecencies against two girls in Rotorua.
In a bid to have his convictions overturned, Palmer has instituted 25 proceedings, including seven private prosecutions.
The defendants included the complainant in the Auckland violation case; her boyfriend; her sister; Crown counsel; defence counsel; police officers; the superintendent of Mt Eden Prison; Telecom NZ; and the manufacturer of an automated toilet whose allegedly bad design caused the door to malfunction and display Palmer, giving rise to the Rotorua convictions.
The Attorney-General sought to have Palmer declared a vexatious litigant, meaning he could not start any more civil proceedings without the permission of a High Court judge.
Crown lawyers contended that the proceedings brought by Palmer constituted an attempt to challenge and attack his criminal convictions indirectly rather than through the proper channels of appeal to the High Court or Court of Appeal and ultimately to the Governor-General.
Justices Baragwanath and Williams ruled that many of the proceedings brought by Palmer were vexatious, but said that it did not necessarily follow that he should be declared a vexatious litigant.
The judges noted that the Ministry of Justice recently appointed Queens Counsel Kristy McDonald to advise the minister whether there was a possibility of a miscarriage of justice in the Auckland sexual violation case which would warrant a reference to the Court of Appeal via the Governor-General.
In addition, the judges said, Palmer had asked the Court of Appeal to reopen both the Rotorua appeal and the Auckland appeal.
"There is, in our view, good reason to defer final judgment until we can know whether there are real grounds for concern about the convictions that have led to preventive detention. If so, that could be of distinct relevance to what course we should adopt," the judges said.
"Should it prove that the conventional processes have, in fact, miscarried and that Mr Palmer's recourse to unorthodox procedures has resulted in correction of miscarriage, that would be a factor relevant to the exercise of discretion."
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