Defence counsel and the Crown prosecutor delivered closing submissions yesterday, and this afternoon Justice Dale La Hood summed up the case before sending the jury out about 3.30pm.
Crown prosecutor Marc Corlett KC submitted most of what happened wasn’t disputed and largely came from the teen’s interview with police that night.
He asked the jury to look at how it all started, with Ronaki upset with Paul for taking the $500, and then telling the teen she’d give him $200 if he helped get it back.
The pair then went driving around looking for Paul.
The pair were then on the phone to each other, yelling, before they saw Paul on the street.
He was yelling that they should hit him before Ronaki told the teen to “run him over then”.
Paul was thrown over the windscreen and suffered a serious head injury on the road. The teen then performed a U-turn and struck him again, this time causing chest-crush injuries.
Corlett said hitting Paul a second time, showed his intention to kill him.
‘Just wanted the arguing to stop’
Defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, said the teen, who faces two charges of murder for each time Paul was struck, had a history of trauma and on the night acted impulsively without forethought in an extremely stressful situation.
He said “all hell broke loose” during the phone call in the car and the whole incident took about 1 minute and 14 seconds.
Mansfield said it would have been a “matter of seconds” between the teen seeing Paul and hitting him.
He had no motive to kill him and had told police he just wanted the arguing to stop and to go home, and was just acting “in the moment”.
The teen did not realise he would kill him and figured Paul might have to go to hospital.
He was simply a “traumatised teen put in a situation of extreme stress”, Mansfield said.
Teen brains were known not to be fully functioning at that stage of their life and known to use the emotional side, rather than the rational part of their brain.
The jury also couldn’t be sure that Paul was still alive when he was struck a second time, so his client should be found not guilty of a second murder charge, Mansfield said.
On behalf of Ronaki, defence counsel Andrew Schulze, said when Ronaki told the teen to “run [Paul] over”, it was an “empty threat” and never intended for the teen to carry it out.
She had also tried to grab the steering wheel before Paul was struck a second time, but the teen had a strong grip.
In evidence, she said she had no recollection of telling him to do that but had since accepted she must have.
She had also acted impulsively and without foresight due to her flight or fight response from her intoxication and PTSD after suffering earlier assaults at Paul’s hands.
‘Drunken intent is still intent’
Ronaki is also defending a charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice after telling police she was driving the car that night.
Corlett submitted her police interview made it clear that she was trying to prevent the right person from being charged.
Schulze argued it wasn’t straightforward and she was still drunk when she gave her police interview.
Police also hadn’t cautioned her that she could be prosecuted for giving a false statement and she simply wanted to protect the teen.
Justice La Hood said while intoxication was relevant to her state of mind and could cloud someone’s judgment, “a drunken intent is still an intent for the purposes of the law”.
Belinda Feek is an Open Justice reporter based in Waikato. She has worked at NZME for nine years and has been a journalist for 20.
