Dr Philip Polkinghorne, the retired eye surgeon acquitted of murdering wife Pauline Hanna, has continued to cast blame on his deceased spouse for the relatively minor methamphetamine charges he already pleaded guilty to.
That strategy backfired today as he returned to the HighCourt at Auckland to be sentenced for the drugs charges.
“I do not accept that assertion,” Justice Graham Lang said of Polkinghorne’s statement to a pre-sentence report writer that his wife bought the drugs and used them with him. “There was no evidence [of that] at trial ... I am satisfied you were the owner and the purchaser of the methamphetamine.”
Lang ordered Polkinghorne to serve 150 hours of community work, rejecting the defence’s request to limit the punishment to a $650 fine.
“I’m satisfied that given your healthy financial situation, a fine would have no deterrence at all,” the judge continued, mentioning again the doctor’s effort “to minimise your involvement ... by bringing your wife into the equation”.
“It’s necessary ... to impose a sentence that holds you accountable to the community for your offending.”
The hearing, which lasted 20 minutes, was in stark contrast to Polkinghorne’s murder trial, which captivated the nation and attracted overflow crowds to the court complex’s largest courtroom as salacious details of the alleged crime – including his alleged “double life” with high-profile Sydney escort Madison Ashton – were slowly revealed over the course of more than eight weeks.
Philip Polkinghorne arrives at court for sentencing alongside his son Taine, sister Ruth Hughes, and lawyers Harrison Smith, Hannah Stuart and Ron Mansfield KC. Photo / Mike Scott
Today’s proceedings took place in the same courtroom but with a much smaller group of onlookers. The small crowd included the defendant’s sister and one of his sons, but Hanna’s family and friends did not attend. Polkinghorne, who sat behind his lawyers throughout the trial, was moved to the dock.
Polkinghorne, 71, began his eight-week trial in July by pleading not guilty to murder but admitted possession of the 37g of methamphetamine that police found in his home and possession of a meth pipe that was stashed under his side of the bed.
The methamphetamine charge carries a maximum possible punishment of six months’ imprisonment and a fine of up to $1000, while the meth utensil charge is punishable by up to 1 year’s imprisonment and a $500 fine. But as a first-time offender, it was never suggested today by lawyers on either side that a custodial sentence was up for consideration.
Crown case
Police began harbouring suspicions about the ophthalmologist within hours of his call to 111 on March 5, 2021, reporting that Hanna, 63, had fatally hanged herself in the foyer of the couple’s $5 million Remuera home.
The bright-orange nylon rope tied to an upstairs railing seemed too loose to support the weight of a person, detectives quickly surmised. Upstairs, in the guest room where Polkinghorne said his wife had slept alone, an ottoman was overturned and the bed was dishevelled – missing a top sheet and with the duvet and pillows thrown on the floor.
Crown solicitor Alysha McClintock suggested during her closing address in September that Polkinghorne was caught off guard by police suspicions – expecting authorities to “rubber stamp” the death as a suicide based on his stature in the community. But as they continued to look into the death, more suspicious behaviour was revealed.
Financial records showed he had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on sex workers in recent years. Over $100,000 was given to Ashton, with whom he had shared hundreds of intimate WhatsApp messages and had secretly flown to visit during Christmas 2019. Ashton, who had been scheduled to testify as a Crown witness but could not be found, told the Herald in an interview that the two had been in a serious relationship since 2017, but broke up in 2021 some time after Hanna’s death. She described Polkinghorne as a “liar” who told her he and his wife had divorced and Hanna was living with another man.
Prosecutors speculated Polkinghorne might have been high on methamphetamine when he killed Hanna in the guest room – either attacking her during an argument over his secrets or stealthily climbing on top of her as she slept and putting her into a fatal chokehold. He then took her body downstairs and staged the suicide scene, they alleged.
Phone records showed he had, for the first time in 12 months, put his phone to airplane mode in the hours before calling police. The day after her death, following a lengthy police interview, he searched on the internet: “leg edema after strangulation”. Two long-time friends of Hanna testified she made an outcry a year before her death in which she said her husband had strangled her and threatened he could do it again.
The defence
But lawyer Ron Mansfield KC dismissed the salacious details as attempts by authorities to circumvent the justice system when they didn’t have any proof a homicide had occurred.
He pointed to Hanna’s decades-long battle with depression, which he said had been exacerbated by her mother’s recent death and her high-stress job helping manage the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine. Hanna’s younger sister flew from the United Kingdom to testify for the defence, telling jurors Hanna made a suicide outcry sometime in the early 1990s after their father had died.
There was also a call to her physician in December 2019, during Polkinghorne’s secret rendezvous with Ashton, in which Hanna said she had considered driving her car into an oncoming truck as she travelled to the couple’s Coromandel bach. She was feeling low because her mother was sick and her husband had left her, she said, but did not follow through with the suicidal thoughts because of her family and fear of getting hurt.
Letters recovered from her laptop showed other moments of self-doubt and references to self-harm.
The defence also pointed to a dangerous cocktail of depression, weight loss and sleeping pills in Hanna’s system that several psychiatrists said could have put her at a higher risk of suicide.
But the centrepiece of the defence case was the pathology evidence.
Four pathologists were called to the witness box – two by the Crown and two by the defence. All of them acknowledged it was rare for a person to be fatally strangled without discernible internal injuries or defensive wounds. Only two of the four could recall a single previous homicidal strangulation that left no signs.
In the end, jurors seemed sceptical of both sides. In a note sent to the judge at the start of their second day of deliberations, the group said most of them did not believe there was enough evidence to support the defence contention that Hanna had committed suicide. But some in the group also didn’t believe the Crown had proved that Polkinghorne caused the death of his wife.
Justice Lang pointed out only the Crown has the burden of proof. Several hours later, they found Polkinghorne not guilty.
The drugs
Although Polkinghorne’s guilty pleas to the two drugs charges at the outset of the trial blurred the focus on them in the weeks that followed, drug use remained a major theme of the murder trial.
The Crown suggested the surgeon had developed a major habit, to the point where it was causing him to act more erratically in the months leading up to Hanna’s death. The 37g found in his home would have equated to about 370 doses with a street value of roughly $13,000, they noted.
Mansfield suggested during cross-examination of witnesses that his client was a recreational user who just happened to buy the drug in bulk because that’s what you do when you’re wealthy – make one big purchase rather than multiple small ones because that reduces the risk.
It was also insinuated by the defence throughout the trial that Hanna, too, was a recreational user of methamphetamine. Post-mortem tests showed no signs of methamphetamine in her body. A hair sample dating back six months also showed no indications of meth use, but the defence pointed out she dyed her hair twice a month, which can cause false negatives.
Internet searches extracted from Hanna’s phone and laptop showed naivety about the drug.
Jurors in the High Court at Auckland were shown a photo of a meth pipe that was found in Philip Polkinghorne's bedroom during the lengthy search of his home.
On Christmas Eve 2020, less than three months before her death, she conducted three back-to-back searches: “p pipe”, “what does p look like” and “what sensation does p give you??”. There were pictures, taken with her phone on Christmas Day, of two used meth pipes that appear to have been found in the couple’s home.
Polkinghorne’s devices, meanwhile, included a screenshot of instructions showing how to make a meth pipe from a lightbulb. It was first accessed on New Year’s Eve 2019 and last viewed in February 2021.
Prosecutors showed jurors a photo of Ashton topless and lying on her stomach in a bed, her pet chihuahuas beside her. The photo, one of thousands of Ashton found on Polkinghorne’s devices, also showed a Sweet Puff meth pipe on the bed stand next to a pair of colourful socks similar to ones the defendant had worn every day to his trial.
In a recent interview with the Herald, Ashton confirmed she would smoke methamphetamine with Polkinghorne and became so concerned about his usage that she texted a warning to his son in 2021. She said she believed he developed a serious drug habit some time in 2018.
A photo found on murder defendant Philip Polkinghorne’s USB showed Sydney escort Madison Ashton on a bed with a 'sweet puff' meth pipe and colourful dress socks on the bed stand.
Jurors also heard during the trial from Auckland Eye clinical director Susan Ormonde, a fellow ophthalmologist who recounted Polkinghorne admitting to methamphetamine use as he visited her lifestyle property a day before his wife’s funeral.
She said she was shocked by the disclosure. He made it sound as if both he and Hanna took the drug, she recalled.
“He asked if we’d ever tried meth,” Ormonde said, explaining that she told him she and her husband hadn’t.
“You should,” she recalled him responding.
Sentencing arguments
Ormonde’s testimony was mentioned by Justice Lang today as he considered what the surgeon’s sentence should be.
Prosecutors McClintock and Pip McNabb also pointed to other evidence presented at trial, including the fact that only his DNA was found on the multiple containers containing the drugs. They described his drug use as “the highest end of offending of its type”.
“The evidence at trial paints a somewhat different picture of Dr Polkinghorne’s methamphetamine use,” McClintock told the judge. “Whilst he accepts he’s in possession of it, [he says] he wasn’t really the principal person responsible for it. There’s no evidence for it.”
She suggested the judge could also consider evidence about the meth pipe found at Auckland Eye.
Mansfield, however, argued that the possession charge was “quite confined” and that trial evidence was irrelevant.
“He’s not here for use of methamphetamine,” the lawyer said, emphasising that usage and possession are two different things. “It’s simply the possession of the drugs found at the address. He’s not being brought before the court for prior use of the drug.”
Mansfield said his client didn’t mention his wife at all during his first pre-sentence interview, but the report writer then called him back and asked specifically about her.
“Certainly, he doesn’t seek to deflect blame to anyone else,” the defence lawyer said. “There’s no suggestion that he wasn’t using methamphetamine.”
But Polkinghorne has been consistently insistent that he only used the drugs recreationally on evenings and weekends and that it never overlapped with his work.
“He hasn’t used the drug following his wife’s death,” Mansfield said, submitting negative drug test results to the judge.
In seeking a fine instead of community work, Mansfield pointed to his client’s 34 years serving the community as an ophthalmologist.
“He has a national and international profile for being one of the very best ophthalmologists in his area of specialty,” Mansfield said, describing the immense media attention to his murder trial as having been “a very public fall from grace”. “He’s now, unfortunately for him, a household name.”
Lang’s decision
Before announcing his decision, Justice Lang broke down the various places in the house where the 37.7g of methamphetamine was found.
There was 18g in a bathroom drawer next to Polkinghorne’s bedroom, in the same drawer with the defendant’s prescription medications. Another 2.9g was found in a plastic container inside a desk drawer in an office area. There was 16.8g in a jar in a bedstand drawer. And there were trace amounts found in a “point bag” that was only discovered by police on a bathroom floor after Polkinghorne was allowed to return to the house to take a shower.
The meth had between 70% and 80% purity.
Justice Lang pointed out that because more than 5g of the drug was discovered, police had the option of charging him with a much more serious offence of possession of methamphetamine for supply. Had that been the case, the legal onus would have been on Polkinghorne to prove that he didn’t have the drug for supply.
“The police plainly accepted you had all the methamphetamine for your own use,” he said.
But Polkinghorne’s claim that he only used the drug on occasion was a step too far, the judge went on to say.
“It is not possible to determine the extent to which you were using methamphetamine as at April 2021 and, indeed, it is not necessary to undertake that exercise for present purposes,” Lang explained. “However, the amount that you acquired gives some indication that you must have been using it on a reasonably regular basis. I consider it unlikely that, as you told the writer of the pre-sentence report, you had used the drug between five and 10 times in your life.
“In your favour, however, I accept that there is no evidence to suggest that your consumption of methamphetamine ever affected the intricate work that you carried out as a retinal eye surgeon. All your work colleagues who gave evidence at the trial spoke highly of your professional abilities. None had cause to suspect that you were consuming methamphetamine during the period leading up to April 2021. This supports your explanation that you only consumed methamphetamine during holidays and at weekends when it would not affect your professional life.”
Justice Graham Lang oversaw the eight-week murder trial of Dr Philip Polkinghorne in the High Court at Auckland, as well as the surgeon's sentencing for drug charges after his murder acquittal. Photo / Michael Craig
Polkinghorne milled about the courtroom with his lawyers for another 20 minutes after the hearing ended.
He’s not sure what kind of community service he will focus on, he told the Herald, explaining that he’s never been the subject of such a court order before so doesn’t know how the process will work.
“He’s looking forward to giving back to the community yet again,” added Mansfield, explaining that whatever he does will “reflect his lifetime of community work”.
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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