Judge Tony Adeane clocks up 25 years behind the bench in Hawke's Bay

Hawke's Bay's Judge Tony Adeane mulls over 25 years in the job. Photo Paul Taylor

The biggest threat to New Zealand's jury system is the internet, according to a Hawke's Bay judge who has seen more jury trials than anyone else.

Judge Tony Adeane has presided over more than 630 jury trials in a career which hits a particular milestone tomorrow, on a Sunday and while on leave.

It'll be 25 years since he took up the appointment, making him now the second-longest serving of more than 100 District Court judges in New Zealand and by many years the longest serving in Hawke's Bay.

Of the current fulltime appointments, only Judge David Saunders, of Christchurch, has been a Judge longer, and then by just 13 days, but there are several retired judges with acting warrants, including Judge Craig Thompson, appointed in June 1992 and who has also served in Hawke's Bay, where he still appears in occasional Environment Court sittings.

Judge Adeane has served the entire quarter-century in Hawke's Bay and Gisborne, where he was born, grew-up and was a lawyer finding himself doing more and more Family Court work before what was a relatively sudden appointment as a jury trial judge at the age of 42.

It's an area well-served with judicial longevity of the home-grown product, Judge Geoff Rea having clocked up 23-1/2 years as a Judge, initially in Waikato, in a legal career spent almost entirely previously in Hawke's Bay as a Crown prosecutor, and Judge Bridget Mackintosh, who grew-up in Hawke's Bay and has been a Judge since January 2003.

Judges Peter Callinicos and Max Courtney, primarily sitting in the Family and Youth courts, were both Napier barristers before their appointments, Judge Callinicos in November 2002, and Judge Courtney in late 2010.

Quick to point out "I'm not retiring", he has made a national name as the Judge who cleaned-up the town, or at least part of it, in his railings against taggers who took to daubing public facilities, private property, fences and streets in increasing waves of graffiti in the early years of the new millennium.

His response, including incarcerating youthful miscreants overnight to think about what they'd done and the possible consequences, and applying custodial sentences to the more serious offenders, has been, he says, well documented and is something of the past on which there is no need to dwell too long.

Observers of the city and suburban streetscapes will have noticed they are, and have been for quite some time, almost free of what he had at times described as a plague on society, amid other condemnations.

But to talk about it further might tempt fate, and more than once a "red rag to a bull" philosophy enters the discussion around society's failings, and judicial steps designed to combat them.

Suffice to say, he was well placed after viewing the defacement, and when the perpetrator appeared before him in the court, he would come up with the memorable quote: "Yes, I've been waiting to meet you."

There's a book in him, as wife Linda agrees, but if so, that's for when he does retire, leaving still a few years doing what he does most days, dealing with the lives of people and their transgressions.

"Very few are really bad people, and those are 'usually products of some very bad circumstances," he says. "All the rest are just people. That has to be kept in mind."

That rejoinder could also be said of the jury members, just people, who like other people are curious and inquisitive, and perhaps prone to googling-away the time at night checking on backgrounds of the people appearing before them in the court.

He worries to think of how often the direction he's given to most of those 630-plus juries to avoid the 'net, like the plague, might have been breached, with possible improper influence on the outcome of trials and without the knowledge of the court.

Trials may have to be called-off because of it, and as debate raged over the British media and subsequent social media naming of the Grace Millane homicide-accused despite interim suppression applying in New Zealand, he says it could take just one major incident — by inference the scrapping of a trial and freeing of a publicly-acclaimed likely-guilty party — to spark the call which might end the days of men and women being judged by their peers.

The principle of "open justice" requires extraordinary circumstances for judges to grant name suppression, even interim suppression pending trials and though the presumption of innocence remains until proven guilty, modern technology now allows people to search on-line for more details about an accused.

By that means inadmissible material unknown to a judge can enter the jury room. That possibility represents the most important issue around the continued viability of trial by jury.

Thus it's beyond commonsense to expect juries in many trials, particularly those of higher profile, to have entered the week with no prior knowledge, leaving the court to hang its faith on judges' directions to put anything they may believe they know about the case to one side, keep away from Google, and not to talk about the case with anyone outside of their number.

"In jury trials you have got to have faith that people are fair minded, that people still respect the presumption of innocence, follow the judge's legal instructions and decide the case solely on the evidence presented in court" he says.

He is quick to identify the driving force behind much of the work of the modern District Court; drug abuse and methamphetamine in particular — "with its associated elated, impulsive, violent and addictive behaviours leading to a plague of domestic violence and general dishonesty at all levels intended to support the addiction."

"And at the other end of the scale the law's infatuation with disqualification from driving often as a result of trivial offending or infringement with little real bearing on public safety," he says.

He is highly complimentary of the work of the Howard League in supporting and encouraging driver licensing and recognising the importance of a driver licence in a pro-social lifestyle.

If everyone was taught to drive properly at an early age to ensure they were safely on the road, with a licence, and if there was no methamphetamine nor psychoactive substances (otherwise known as synthetics) he wouldn't have to think about retiring.

The monumental workload would evaporate, and allow him to become redundant.

Father of an adult son and adult daughter, with three young grandchildren, he has a natural keen eye on outcomes for the young, but in the courtroom it can be left with despair, particularly with the numbers committing serious crimes, which include a new wave of aggravated robberies, which carry penalties of up to 14 years in jail.

There are weekly, or more frequently, events in the courts. Just yesterday, youths aged just 18 and 17 jailed for the violent robbing of a bottle store in Hastings, with a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old who appear in the Youth Court next Thursday.

Another yesterday who was 17 when he and two other teenagers robbed a Flaxmere dairy, and a fortnight ago two teenagers jailed for separate robberies, one two days after being granted home detention for another robbery.

"It's going backwards," he laments, a Judge who easily recalls another event of three teenagers who robbed a Napier dairy backgrounded with tales of how one had been pondering the problem of how to get around the costs of a car, including high infringement fines for such misdemeanours as driving without or outside terms of a licence, or a vehicle without up-to-date registration or warrant of fitness.

As it happens, the event was in 2006 — 12 years ago.

While the winds of change are slow on some accounts, the wheels of justice also crawl at a disheartening pace, as process after process and reports take, usually, many months to meld into a decision, when all most want is to know the decision, which he says does contribute to some of the disrespect of what some sectors refer to as the clients.

So too the array of courts, evolving from what was once the quite "simple" process of the Magistrate's Court, which became District Courts in 1980.

Again suffice to say he wonders where we are going with domestic violence courts and others structured for single-purpose.

But processes have given judges extra arrows in their quivers, with restorative justice as one example if used properly and able to help achieve a reasonable outcome.

While Judges may search their minds for outcomes in the case of young people falling foul of the law and about to mess-up good prospects, Judges find the most difficult matters to deal with are the consequences of road tragedies, not infrequently someone charged with careless driving cause death or serious injury, for a moment's inattention on the back of years of unblemished driving.

"Sometimes the parties can show a huge compassion for the other side ... but sometimes they struggle to do that."

Judge Adeane was, of course, himself once young and enjoying it, getting his first motorbike at the age of 15. It was just a couple of years ago that he relinquished the Triumph Bonneville that had been his most recent two-wheeler of the highway.

But it's almost never that he felt like hitting the highway in any other way, not even when after five years as a Judge there was the opportunity to be appointed elsewhere.

"After five years there was nowhere else I wanted to go to," he says.