Scott Guy murder trial and Mark Lundy retrial judge Simon France dies, age 64

Justice Simon France died on Saturday after a brief illness. He had been appointed permanently to the Court of Appeal last August. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Justice Simon France, who presided over notable trials including the Scott Guy murder trial and the Mark Lundy retrial, has died aged 64.

Justice France recently retired from the Court of Appeal, to which he was appointed as a permanent member only last August, because he was unwell.

He died on Saturday evening after a brief illness, according to a tribute on Tuesday from the Chief Justice, Dame Helen Winkelmann.

“On behalf of the New Zealand judiciary, I acknowledge Simon’s lifetime of service to the law and to his community - as a legal practitioner, a teacher, an academic and latterly as a judge,” Dame Helen said.

“Simon was respected and loved by his former students, by his colleagues from his years in practice, and by his judicial peers.

“He was a gifted lawyer and a skilled communicator with a style which was unmistakably his own.”

Justice France studied law at the University of Auckland and Queen’s University in Ontario, and was admitted to the bar in 1979.

He lectured at Victoria University of Wellington in the 1980s and joined the Crown Law Office in 1995.

He was appointed a High Court judge in 2005, making him one-half of the first married couple to both sit on the High Court bench - his wife, now Supreme Court Justice Dame Ellen France, had been made a judge three years earlier.

Among the notable cases he tried in the High Court was the killing of Feilding farmer Scott Guy in 2010.

Guy’s brother-in-law, Ewen Macdonald, was charged with his murder in April 2011. He was acquitted at the jury trial the following year but was jailed for five years for other offences, including arson, poaching, and vandalising the Guys’ property.

The then Judge France also presided over the 2015 retrial that found Mark Lundy guilty for a second time of murdering his wife, Christine, and 9-year-old daughter Amber, who died in a brutal attack in their Palmerston North home in 2000.