Killer didn’t access website calling him 'compassionate'

Saturday, 4 November 2023

Murderer Phillip Smith didn’t personally operate or access a website that called him “loving and compassionate”, prison authorities say.

Smith, 49, has periodically continued to offend even while serving a life jail term, fleeing to Brazil in 2014 while on temporary leave from prison, and committing dishonesty offences through making false tax-related claims.

In prison Smith had computer access to a limited number of websites to prepare for legal proceedings.

Corrections says it was legally required to give prisoners facilities to prepare for legal proceedings, and that could include access to computers.

In August The Post revealed that a website had been set up about Smith, with photos of him, and the anonymous author said their experience of him was that he was “warm, loving and compassionate”.

Smith is serving a life jail term imposed for the 1995 murder in Wellington of a man whose son he sexually abused.

Earlier, Smith had blackmailed a man who then took his own life.

In 2014 Smith was allowed temporary leave from prison before escaping New Zealand using a passport issued in his birth name, Traynor. He travelled to Brazil, was caught and returned to New Zealand.

The discovery of the website sparked an urgent investigation in the Department of Corrections to check Smith’s computer use and ensure he had not, and could not, operate or access the website from within prison.

His computer access was stopped, but reinstated within a month.

Corrections acting national commissioner Sean Mason said the review analysed computers available to approved prisoners, to make sure they had not been used inappropriately, testing to check the Smith website could not be accessed, and whether Phillip Smith should have access to a computer.

The reviews found no inappropriate use of the computers, no evidence Smith or anyone else could access the Smith website or the tools used to create it, he said.

“Our Mr Smith would not have been able to do anything with his website from the SOL [secure online learning] suite,” the principal security analyst said in an email released under the Official Information Act.

A Corrections search of Smith’s cell and the surrounding unit found no communication device he could have accessed.

Each prison has at least one room of computers for education, rehabilitation and legal purposes. Smith could access only a government-run legislation website and a legal information website, Corrections had previously said.

Users had to be registered, and had personalised and fingerprint logins to access the computers, Mason said.

Smith was last considered for parole in April 2022. The Parole Board decision said he would be seen again by the end of March 2024.

“The concern of the psychologists and the board over the years has been that Mr Smith has continued in a manipulative and deceitful way,” the board said.

It noted he had completed a child sex offender treatment programme. “He did develop an intellectual understanding of the content of the programme, but the psychological report says that he lacked a congruent emotional response,” the board said.

At the time he still had fraud-type charges before the court, but those were now over. Corrections considered whether those charges were grounds to deny him use of a computer, but the national manager of security and custodial operations, Dawn Taylor, wrote she was not confident of being able to prove a “tangible link” between the offending and his use of a computer.

The offences were not specific to computer use and the judge said Smith had “caused” documents to be accessed for committing the fraud, not that he had accessed them himself.

An anonymous supporter who answered The Post’s email inquiry to the Phillip Smith website said Smith did not ask for it to be set up.

It was set up in September 2022 to provide an alternative view of him based on experience of people who supported him, the person said.

The website has continued to change. The web address has changed, a reference to him enjoying “generous amenities and what he says are comfortable prison conditions” was deleted, and a selection of family photographs has moved to a protected area.

Mason said Corrections knew how distressing the Smith website would be for those impacted by Smith’s offending, and the trauma they had each time he attracted further attention.