A High Court judge will this morning announce whether suppression orders will be revised in the case of a criminal on parole who killed a woman in a car crash.
When the man appeared in court on charges related to the December 2006 crash he used a name
created for him under the witness protection scheme.
This masked his extensive criminal history and the fact he was on parole, and meant the judge treated him as a first offender. Despite being on a final warning for traffic offences, the police informer walked free from court.
A month later he killed a 20-year-old woman when his car crossed the centre line and crashed into hers.
The suppression ruling has been challenged by The Dominion Post, along with Crown Law on behalf of police and the Corrections Department.
The mother of the woman killed told the newspaper today that she will lay a complaint with the Law Society against the man's lawyer, Mark Dollimore, who allowed his client to give the false name in court to avoid being returned to prison.
Police and Corrections staff - who also knew the man used a false name in court - were "captured" by the secrecy of the witness protection programme, she said.
Mr Dollimore has declined to comment.
Auckland University senior law lecturer Scott Optican said a lawyer had an ethical obligation not to mislead the courts but the case was made trickier by the man being in the witness protection programme.
"The lawyer has to protect his client's identity and the last thing the lawyer would want to do is divulge previous convictions under his client's old name. It may have been he was acting in good faith with the programme."
- NZPA
