Bashed barrister lashes out

By JAMES GARDINER

Bashed barrister John Timmins says the criminal justice system is failing victims like him and members of his profession are exploiting it.

More than a year after he was beaten, kicked and left for dead in an Onehunga backstreet, Mr Timmins, aged 51, is far from a full recovery.

He says he was devastated by the attack and may never work again.

Joshua Wiremu McIsaac, 28, was this week sentenced in the High Court at Auckland to seven years in jail. Justice Peter Salmon said the term was a generous two-year discount in recognition of McIsaac's guilty plea.

In October last year, Mr Timmins was found badly beaten, covered in blood and semi-conscious outside a factory. His last memory was of being at work in the central city the night before.

Details of McIsaac's record, described by the judge as shocking, were read out in court. Numerous violent crimes included attacks on women and a 2-year-old.

McIsaac's mother apologised to the Timmins family but Mr Timmins said her son's lack of remorse still rankled with him.

Mr Timmins, an accomplished commercial and employment lawyer who has had to abandon his practice, said he needed four medical treatments a week.

His recovery depended on doses of drugs not being too powerful and that left him in constant pain with chronic headaches that knocked him off his feet for up to three days.

"I feel that the criminal justice system is all a bit of a farce really. It's supposedly a restorative justice system but sentencing him to seven years in prison doesn't put me back in the position I was in.

"Also, I know that seven years is not genuine. It's going to be 3 1/2 years, and he's apparently committed serious offences, including the one where he attacked me, while he's been out on parole before. Shouldn't he be disqualified from any further entitlement to parole?

"What is our system doing? Why isn't the court more honest?

Mr Timmins said it was ridiculous that McIsaac got seven years for attacking him and four years for taking his car and writing it off. "It's only a car; I find that weird, really.

"I haven't done any criminal law for over 20 years and I find it a very challenging process.

"It's time we brought it up to date instead of this old Etonian system we have of adversarial justice, which is just procedural antics. It certainly doesn't do victims any good. I think it does them quite a lot of harm.

He suggested looking at the European countries' inquisitorial justice systems and dropping a lot of the "procedural ploys available to defence counsel".

Criminal legal aid cost a fortune and bred manipulation of the system that served no one's interests.

"To be blunt about it, you've got to look at the criminal Bar who live off it and the people around them like private detectives and so on who benefit from it.

"The system works in such a way that there are all these procedural devices available to an accused. Now some of them might work for them.

"It's a defendant-biased system, not a victim-biased system, and I found all that pretty hard.

"It's taken over a year for him [McIsaac] to plead guilty and he's been given a two-year credit for pleading guilty. I don't believe that he should have been given a two-year credit but no one takes any notice of what victims say."

* james_gardiner@nzherald.co.nz