No, I do not go along with September’s Court of Appeal decision that turned down the latest bid to quash Scott Watson’s convictions for the murders of Olivia Hope and Ben Smart. An interested party described the judgment very well in an email. He wrote, “291 pages of froth and flannel”. Mind you, I kind of set him up to say something like that.
I emailed him with no content, just six words in the subject line: “What’s the fucking point sometimes, right?” I don’t know if he shared my anger and disgust – as a hothead from way back, I am unable to view things temperately – but he knew where I was coming from. We had both attended the appeal hearing in Wellington last year. We had both seen and heard enough to think Watson had a real chance of finally, finally beating the system.
No, I do not agree with the findings of the Court of Appeal, or see their reasoning as anything but the worst kind of smug complacency and stupid intransigence. You could sense them yawning throughout their 291-page denial, feel their deep boredom as they set out the old familiar background.
Watson was convicted of the double murder of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope somewhere on the waters of the Marlborough Sounds or Cook Strait on New Year’s Day, 1998. The case was circumstantial. Two important strands of evidence were that Olivia’s hair was found on Watson’s boat, and that he was identified as taking the pair on board his boat on the last night they were seen alive. The Court of Appeal ruling begins, “It is a case that has gripped but troubled the nation.” It still ought to.
No, I do not know more or better than the three wise Appeal Court judges. Watson’s defence challenged the two pieces of evidence (the hair, the sighting) and called expert witnesses. The one thing everyone who knows anything about the case is that eyewitness Guy Wallace claimed Ben and Olivia were taken to a long, graceful two-mast ketch on the night they disappeared, and not Watson’s tiny single-mast sloop Blade that he knocked up at home. The judgment yawns its head off when it brushes this small, apparently really insignificant detail aside, and concludes, “The issue falls away in importance and is simply another example of the vagaries of memory and perception.” God almighty. The court’s decision was announced the same day that the world learned of Banksy’s latest artwork: a judge beating a pro-Palestine protester with his gavel.
No, I have no business meddling in a family tragedy. After I wrote about the hearing last year, I got an email from a family friend of Ben Smart. He was angry and pained. He wrote, “The Smart family lost a son and a brother and for over two decades, the New Zealand media has turned coverage of his and Olivia’s murders into a type of sport where everyone gets to pick a side.” This is entirely fair and so is the position of Chris Watson, Scott Watson’s dad, whom I met at the appeal hearing. Nice guy. He has never wavered in his belief that his son is innocent. Interviewed by RNZ after the appeal was dismissed, he said he would continue fighting. “We’ll just keep plodding on.”
No, I don’t have a single helpful idea about what happened that night on New Year’s Eve, 1997. But from all my reading, I think the case against Watson is rotten to the core. I think it is an unsafe conviction. I think the Court of Appeal couldn’t have cared less. The system always, always wins.
