Convicted killer, rapist Malcolm Rewa fails in fourth murder trial bid

Malcolm Rewa in the Auckland High Court for his 2019 sentencing for the rape and murder of Susan Burdett. He has since lost his latest appeal over her murder. Photo / Michael Craig

Convicted killer and rapist Malcolm Rewa has had his bid for a fourth trial over the murder of Susan Burdett dismissed.

Rewa was convicted in 2019 of Burdett’s murder after Teina Pora wrongly spent two decades in prison for her killing.

In December, the Court of Appeal heard the appeal over Rewa’s murder conviction and today issued its findings.

Rewa’s lawyer, Mark Ryan, submitted that the conduct of his client’s last lawyer created an unfair trial, and that the judge’s warnings to a witness deprived the jury of the chance to assess the person’s answers properly.

Susan Burdett was found dead in her South Auckland home in 1992.

It was Rewa’s third trial for the murder charge, having already been convicted of Burdett’s rape.

He was seeking his fourth trial over the case.

Ryan said they were seeking a retrial as there had been a miscarriage of justice.

One aspect of the appeal focused on the evidence of a witness.

The trial judge had warned one witness of his legal right to decline to answer questions if it could incriminate himself.

Due to this warning, the witness declined to answer most of the defence counsel’s questions, which Ryan said “deprived” the jury of the chance to assess his answers and credibility.

Ryan also criticised Rewa’s trial lawyer, Paul Chambers, describing him as “clumsy”, that he had “poor thought processes in a jumbled fashion”, and said his closing did not do Rewa any benefit at all.

Ryan also challenged the admission to the jury that Rewa had a conviction for raping Burdett, as Rewa’s defence relied on the assertion he didn’t rape her, but instead had a consensual relationship with her.

For the appeal, Chambers declined to provide the Court of Appeal with an affidavit, instead only submitting a psychiatric report and application for leave to withdraw.

The court found that Chambers was “distressed and distracted by historic events in his life and reported experiencing dissociative incidents”.

“He nonetheless presented as being intelligent, oriented and reasonably insightful, with no gross indication of impaired judgment,” the judges wrote in their findings today.

“This material does not sustain a conclusion that counsel was impaired at the time of trial.”

The court found Chambers did not prepare Rewa to give evidence, but Rewa, in turn, didn’t point to anything that he could have said, or should have said, had he been prepared.

“In our view, the closing address adequately presented the defence case and came nowhere near fundamental error,” the judges said.

Chambers told the jury in his closing that he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but that his symptoms were minimal. He addressed a defence witness, suggesting her symptoms were similar to that of PTSD, before going on to develop the defence case.

“His approach was irregular, not least because there was no evidence about the effects of PTSD, but we are not persuaded that had any effect on the outcome,” the judges said.

The high court judge in the 2019 trial also allowed the jury to learn about Rewa’s rape conviction, which Ryan argued might have an unfair prejudice on the proceeding.

However, the judge also permitted evidence showing he did not commit the rape, before asking the jury to put that conviction aside when deciding Rewa’s fate.

As the rape conviction was not treated as conclusive evidence at trial, the court found there had been no unfair prejudice in the case.

Rewa was sentenced to life imprisonment for Burdett’s murder, to be served concurrently with his existing 22-year preventive detention sentence for his rapes.