Tapu Misa: Ugly facts of murder trials hard to avoid

Television served him up every night, for our entertainment and horrified attention. It was ugly but compelling viewing. We were sickened, angered, and fascinated in turn.

From the moment Clayton Weatherston confidently declared that he was not guilty of murder but guilty of the manslaughter of Sophie Elliott, almost as if he was making a clever point in one of his economics lectures, we were repulsed.

It beggared belief that anyone could stab his ex-girlfriend to death, mutilate her body, and then mount a defence of provocation. She'd come at him with a (small) pair of scissors, he claimed; she'd insulted his family; she'd caused him emotional pain. Whatever. It's not just that we disbelieved him; it's that none of that added up to the 216 stab wounds he inflicted on her.

The court of public opinion delivered its verdict long before the jury withdrew to decide whether Weatherston was guilty of murder.

Was it his idea to take the stand? It would not have been out of character for the preening, self-obsessed man that emerged from several days of self-promoting testimony. Maybe he thought his academic achievements would dazzle the jury into forgetting the horror of his crime. Maybe his lawyers were counting on the open display of his clearly disordered personality to gain him sympathy. It didn't pay off. It only made him easier to dislike. He showed no shame, no remorse, no insight into any of his actions. Of course he took responsibility, he'd played a part in Sophie's death, but, as he told one psychiatrist, he'd thought so much about what had happened since then that he was "over it".

We don't often get to see such undisguised and chilling detachment.

What do we do with someone like Weatherston? He's not certifiably insane but he's not right either, which, despite the middle-class, highly educated facade that probably hid his true nature for so long, makes him a closer relative to many sociopathic killers than might have appeared at first.

Weatherston had his days in court, but what about Sophie Elliott, the pretty 22-year-old who was, by all accounts, on the verge of a brilliant career in economics when Weatherston ended her life? Not only was her death examined in minute detail, but her life was raked over, the contents of her personal diaries made public, her character picked apart by Weatherston and other witnesses for the defence. No indignity was spared her.

The dead have no right in law to privacy - and murder victims even less so. Media coverage exacerbates that, increases the damage. The victim is victimised all over again, this time on the evening news.

That Weatherston could resent Sophie for the attention she got after he murdered her shows how dangerously self-absorbed he was. It annoyed him that she was being portrayed as a saint while he was being vilified. She was the one with the borderline personality disorder. She was the one who was violent. She was the attempted murderer who provoked him by attacking him with a pair of scissors.

Did we see Weatherston's attempt to smear Sophie as anything other than the product of his own narcissistic view of the world? Apparently. An associate law professor from the University of Auckland told Breakfast last week that half her students believed the killer's portrayal of Sophie.

Weatherston's parents are also standing by their son. They told the Herald on Sunday that they felt "ambushed" by Sophie's mother Lesley Elliott hugging them after the verdict was delivered.

Yuleen Weatherston says her son is "an extremely honest and sensitive person" and she and her husband believe he was telling the truth. They say he was entitled to pursue the defence of provocation, as the only legitimate option left to him. It's hard to fault them for loving their son, but they might reflect that, even if everything he'd said on the witness stand was the truth as he saw it, a normal human being would have felt some remorse about what happened. Weatherston seemed not to know what remorse looks like.

It's natural to want some good to come out of so much ugliness. Sophie's mother, who listened helplessly while her daughter was being murdered in her bedroom, wants to devote her energies to keeping young girls away from abusive relationships.

As well, Weatherston's trial - and that of Ferdinand Ambach who killed 69-year-old Ronald Brown in an apparent homophobic rage - has renewed calls to do away with provocation as a defence.

That's understandable but I agree with those who urge caution. As Dr Chris Gallavin, a senior law lecturer at the University of Canterbury argued last week, changing in the midst of a public outcry can lead to "unintended consequences". He's against getting rid of provocation without an alternative defence. Not all murders occur in the same circumstances, and we should be slow to deprive defendants of legitimate avenues of defence where it's demonstrably justified.

Justice as spectacle isn't pretty. We rightly recoil from the lack of empathy and conscience that Weatherston displayed. He wasn't content with taking Sophie Elliott's life, he wanted to dismantle her reputation as well.

But taking away provocation won't stop lawyers employing similar tactics. As University of Auckland professor of law Warren Brookbanks has said, it won't prevent victims being re-victimised or make the "ugly facts of homicide trials suddenly disappear".