Crown Solicitor the hunter of all our nightmares

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Last time we met, there were two of you," says Simon Moore, extending a hand as large as his grin is wide.

That last occasion, the first time I met the Crown Solicitor, was a martini party.

These martini parties are legendary in certain circles. They are now held only once a decade because that is generally how long it takes to recover.

So I would be delighted to report that the above statement from the Crown Solicitor is a truthful version of events.

Alas, on that occasion Moore was perfectly well behaved, charming and, it appeared to me, perfectly sober. All four of him.

It is just as well that there is only one of Simon Moore: he is a man with a big presence, and his office is small. It is much less grand than you might expect would be the due of the Auckland Crown Solicitor.

That is if you expected anything. Because the Crown Solicitor is a prosecutor and defence is seen as the glamorous, high-profile side of the criminal justice system.

Defence lawyers might get the publicity. Moore gets to hang the warrant from the Governor-General in his rooms at Meredith Connell, where he is a partner. The law firm has held the warrant since the 1920s. It invests in the Auckland Crown Solicitor "especial trust and confidence, loyalty, integrity and ability".

He represents the "community of Auckland in the prosecution of its crime". Crime here means the big cases. He shares his CV with a roll-call of rapists and murderers. Names like Malcolm Rewa and South Auckland serial rapist Joseph Stephenson Thompson stand out on the page. And in our nightmares. Do they lurk in the dreams of the prosecutor?

"If they did I wouldn't tell you," he says. "I would never tell anyone that." Not anyone? "No. Not anyone at all. Probably not even at home."

He probably gets asked about cases at martini parties: "Well, of course I can never remember."

As second counsel in the Peter Plumley-Walker murder case, which ran from 1989 through 1991 and which introduced the word "dominatrix' to the wider community, he was much in demand as a dinner guest.

You can imagine it appealed to his sense of humour to be wined and dined secure in the knowledge that a gentleman prosecutor does not talk, with or without his mouth full. He is useless as a gossip, but is no doubt a delightful dinner companion.

His story-telling skills are well honed from his years in a courtroom. He tells me one that sums up the conflicts of the time, about prosecutions in the aftermath of the 1981 Springbok Tour. (During which, incidentally, many of the protesters were his mates.)

In this particular case, the defence called a secret witness who came into the courtroom wearing a purple shirt. It was Bishop Desmond Tutu.

"Automatically the jury stood up ... Slowly counsel started to stand up," he says. "I remember the judge looking at me, and I looked at the judge. We all ended up standing up. I can't remember my cross [examination] other than I'm sure it was desultory and ineffective."

Moore did not set out to be a prosecutor. He thinks back "to my liberal upbringing, and although I always wanted to be an advocate and criminal law certainly interested me, the only thing I ever wanted to do was defence work".

He entertained, and entertains still, a slight suspicion about those who would be prosecutors. By which he means the image of the prosecutor "out to measure their success by the number of convictions and the robust and relentless way in which they prosecute".

A good prosecutor is the understated prosecutor, he says. "Because they're the ones who connect with juries." The "reptilian, jack-booted" approach doesn't work.

"If there is one thing New Zealanders are adamant about it's a sense of fairness. [So] a prosecutor who hates, or has a passion against, those who commit a crime is never going to be any good in court.

"With very limited exceptions, most of the people we prosecute are normal human beings. Every one of them deserves courtesy. You'll never hear me call the accused person by their surname."

Well, no. That would be very ill-mannered. And Moore's upbringing taught him a bit about courtesy. His father is distinguished surgeon Sir Patrick Moore, who saw medicine, says his son, "as a true profession which was not dominated by the avaricious pursuit of money".

Sir Patrick was awarded an OBE for services to medicine and Maori. He spoke Maori at home to his sons.

There are four successful Moore boys. The two eldest are doctors; the two youngest lawyers. Moore and his wife, Jane, have three sons, aged 16, 15 and 11.

As a sort of supplementary response to the question about the effects of prosecuting horrific cases, he phones back to emphasise the importance of family in "allowing me to do what I do".

He would rather talk about victims' rights and the rights of the community than the big wins. Though he has not lost a big one, he is careful to say "it's inevitable".

He insists it is not false modesty to say "I wouldn't regard myself as the best prosecutor in the firm".

"Who is? I won't tell you. You might walk out the door and interview them."

H E HAS a healthy sense of the absurd, as his CV shows. Listed under publications is an anthropology paper entitled Third Bovine Phalanx. "It was all about cow's toebones. It was a terribly important study." He does mock-pompous terribly well.

But not on horseback. He was elected Deputy Master of the Pakuranga Hunt last year.

He cannot be a vain man. A vain man would not have handed over a photo of himself on his horse, CC, which shows the Crown Solicitor with his tongue sticking out.

He pays me back for teasing him about hunting being a very non-PC sort of sport by explaining very slowly, as if to an idiot, that hunting is done "with hounds". That hounds hunt hares, "which they never get". And he loves it: "It's like fishing on horses."

Other than riding horses through mud, here is what passes for glamour in the life of the Crown Solicitor. In March 2000 he was appointed Public Prosecutor for Pitcairn Island, the most distant outpost of the British empire.

Last November he spent eight days getting to Pitcairn. He travelled on a container ship packed with inflammable substances and skippered by a cigarette-smoking captain.

Almost nobody gets to go to the close-knit, suspicious, community of 43. It is a rugged place made romantic by the Mutiny on the Bounty legend, and now riven with allegations of endemic sexual abuse. Moore's job is to decide whether charges will be laid.

He will talk enthusiastically about the delights of "a tropical island with none of that antiseptic tourist thing". He'll entertain with the story about "leaving the security of that huge ship to clamber into ... a tiny longboat, manned almost exclusively by the same people ... who we knew the police were investigating".

One day this will make another fascinating chapter in the history of the island. But not yet. Moore is predictably, and properly, tightlipped about Pitcairn.

Tantalisingly just out of reach is a series of files with "Pitcairn" written in bold black letters on the spines. Could I just have a quick look in those files?

"Of course you can, of course you can," he says, smiling like a tiger.

The Crown Solicitor makes a very fine addition to a martini party. He is a gracious and expansive interviewee. I am sure he is faultlessly polite in a courtroom. I would not like to meet him there.