KEY POINTS:
A jury will today begin to consider whether businessman Bruce Emery murdered a teenage tagger or if he was acting in self-defence.
Justice Hugh Williams will sum up the case this morning before the jury begins its deliberations.
Emery has been on trial in the High Court at
Auckland for the murder of 15-year-old Pihema Cameron in Manurewa last January.
Pihema Cameron died within minutes of being stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife Emery carried.
Pihema and a 16-year-old friend had been tagging properties and Emery thought they had tagged his garage door. He chased them for more than 300m then confronted the pair.
He has pleaded not guilty to murder, saying he was defending himself.
The Crown closed its case against Emery yesterday and, with the defence not calling any witnesses, both sides summed up their cases to the jury.
Prosecutor Aaron Perkins said Emery was not defending himself but using his anger to punish them for tagging his garage door.
"On a daily basis people do worse things than what Pihema Cameron did to this man. People are expected to show restraint, not take the law into their own hands."
Mr Perkins said Emery was "an angry man" who had a history of vandals tagging his property. "And he finally catches one."
"The combination of an angry man with a potentially lethal weapon. The outcome... is what we see here," he told the jury.
He asked them to consider the evidence of Pihema's friend, who has name suppression, and what Emery told police.
The friend said Emery had thrust his knife at Pihema while Emery claims the teen "stepped into" it.
Mr Perkins said Emery couldn't use self-defence as defence because that could only be legally used if that was the main motivation.
"He used the knife not in self-defence, but to vent his anger."
Emery's lawyer, Chris Comeskey, told the jury that what happened was not murder but self-defence.
The events that night happened quickly and Emery didn't have time to think, grabbing a knife when he should have grabbed a "non-lethal" weapon like a rubber hose.
"The accused could have gone home - but that doesn't make him a violent killer. He took a risk. If he's as angry as the Crown is saying, why wasn't it a frenzied attack?"
The knife that killed Pihema had a 14cm blade but a pathologist found it penetrated him only 5cm.
"It's more probable the deceased hasn't seen the knife and he's walked into it," Mr Comeskey said. "The pathologist said the knife went in 5cm, so it can't have been caused by a thrust."
He said if jurors had reasonable doubt whether Emery put the knife into the teen they had to acquit him.
