An Auckland man who stabbed his soon-to-be-ex partner’s male friend through the heart with a steak knife has been acquitted of murder after one hour of deliberations.
Chrishan Raju, 27, bounced from foot to foot as he stood in the High Court at Auckland dock waiting for the verdict to be announced, chewing his lower lip. He bowed to Justice Michele Wilkinson-Smith after being told he would be released from custody shortly.
Raju was arrested in February last year after the deadly confrontation with Joeli Rankin inside Raju’s Mt Albert Kāinga Ora flat.
Neither side disagreed that Rankin had entered the home aggressively while holding a machete. Video played for jurors left no doubt he yelled out threats, shattered the window to Raju’s bedroom and beat the front door with a piece of wood before trying unsuccessfully to kick it in.
But what happened before and after that short video, and how jurors should interpret those events, remained in dispute during Tuesday’s closing arguments.
Crown prosecutor Sam McMullan directed jurors repeatedly to the testimony from Raju’s ex-partner, who said she called Rankin to ask for help leaving the house “in peace” after Raju wouldn’t let her move out with her two young children.
When Raju overheard her on the phone with Rankin, she said, the defendant threatened to “shank” her friend if he came over. He grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen and stabbed multiple holes in the wall to make his point clear, she said.
When Rankin entered the home through an unlocked ranch slider, the witness said he walked past her and went straight to Raju’s room. She described hearing a scuffle and something that sounded like the hit of a machete before both men emerged with blood “squirting” from one of them.
She told jurors at one point that she saw Raju stab Rankin two or three times in the hallway when it appeared Rankin no longer had the machete, although she admitted she had her eyes closed for some of the time because she hated the sight of blood.
Emergency responders later recalled Raju explaining to them: “I was sleeping and somebody came in with a machete and stabbed me.”
But it’s clear that was a lie, McMullan said, pointing to phone records showing he had been awake.
“He didn’t call police,” McMullan said. “He was waiting in his bedroom for Mr Rankin to come in – waiting for his opportunity to shank him.”
Stabbing a person with a 7cm-deep wound to the heart suggests a desire to kill, McMullan said. Even if jurors thought there was an element of self-defence, Raju’s level of force was unjustified to the point that he should still be found guilty of murder, he argued.
But defence lawyer Jasper Rhodes dismissed the Crown’s case as having a “dangerous” reliance on the ex-girlfriend’s testimony, which the lawyer described as “incredibly inconsistent” and misleading.
He suggested the woman was outright fabricating testimony about Raju holding her in the home against her will, threatening to “shank” Rankin if he arrived, retrieving a knife well before the other man’s arrival and stabbing the wall. Rhodes also said her account of seeing Raju stab Rankin after the machete was dropped was in contrast to her own earlier statements to police.
A more likely scenario, he suggested, was that Raju was “hiding” from Rankin in his bedroom when he was attacked.
“He’d been told in no uncertain terms what Mr Rankin was going to do to him,” Rhodes said. “His response was a reasonable and proportionate reaction to the threat he faced.
“Joeli Rankin did not deserve to die, but neither did Chrishan Raju.”
It’s unrealistic to think Raju’s only legal option was to stand there passively as an armed man “intent on serious violence” burst into his room, Rhodes argued, noting that a toxicology report showed methamphetamine and anti-psychotic medication in Rankin’s blood. Without Raju defending himself, “there is every chance he would have been taken out of that house in a body bag”, he argued.
Rhodes urged jurors to follow their oath by being dispassionate and impartial, even if it meant an ultimately “unsatisfying” verdict based on reasonable doubt.
“You may not necessarily be convinced that Mr Raju is innocent, but you don’t need to be,” he said. “You need to be convinced ... that he is guilty.”
He acknowledged that jurors may be acclimatised to tidy endings from true crime podcasts and other media. But that’s not their job, he said.
“It is okay to have a doubt about something,” he said. “It’s not a failure. Don’t fall into the trap of needing to solve something just because somebody has died.”
The verdict followed three days of witness testimony over the past week.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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