Scott Watson appeal: Day one
Monday, 10 June 2024
The Post senior writer Mike White has been covering the Scott Watson case since day one. Check back on The Post after 5pm for his reporting of day two of the appeal.
The high stakes involved in Scott Watson’s appeal against his convictions for murdering Ben Smart and Olivia Hope were swiftly revealed when the court hearing began in Wellington on Monday.
Five lawyers for the Crown sat opposite four lawyers for Watson, in front of three senior judges. In the public gallery, a phalanx of police officers sat opposite Watson’s father, Chris, brother, Tom, and other family members.
And while all sleeved in silk and civility, it didn’t take long before accusations were loosed that a pre-eminent international expert had been biased and misleading.
Watson has spent 26 years in prison for murdering Hope, 17, and Smart, 21, after a New Year’s party in the Marlborough Sounds in January 1998. Their bodies have never been found.
The 53-year-old has always insisted he is innocent, and the case remains among the most controversial in the country’s history.
It is Watson’s second appeal, his first, in 2000, was dismissed.
One of the grounds for this week’s appeal is whether the identification of Watson, by key witness Guy Wallace, one of the last people to see Hope and Smart alive, was reliable.
Wallace was the water-taxi driver who delivered the pair to a mystery yacht with a mystery man who had offered them a place to sleep for the night
Wallace initially denied Watson was the mystery man. But four months after Smart and Hope disappeared, Wallace picked Watson from a police photo montage as most likely being the man on the water-taxi, and repeated this at Watson’s trial.
But two reports by top international experts have questioned the reliability of Wallace’s identification, based on mistakes made by police, and the conditions Wallace made it under.
A joint report for Watson by American witness expert Gary Wells, and former New Zealander Adele Quigley-McBride, found: 'The conclusion we reach from our analysis is that Wallace’s identification testimony has little to no incriminating probative value regarding the identity of the person who was left with the victims in the early hours of the morning on January 1st, 1998.'
However, on Monday, Crown lawyer Stuart Baker suggested Wells and McBride had been selective in the information they included in their report, made mistakes, hadn’t read all the evidence, and been unbalanced and biased.
“Are you trying to be independent in this report, or are you advocating for Mr Watson?” Baker alleged to Wells, a professor at Iowa State University and considered one of the world’s leading experts in witness evidence.
“I’m not advocating for Mr Watson,” Wells replied. “I don’t care about him. I didn’t even know about this case. It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.
“But I do want eyewitness evidence interpreted correctly. There’s a science to it.
“And when it’s very important to the individuals involved, and to justice, it’s important to get the eyewitness evidence right.”
Baker spent much of the day attempting to undermine Wells and Quigley-McBride’s report, repeatedly suggesting they were speculating.
Wells insisted their conclusions were based on research and science, and many factors in the police investigation, including police showing Wallace a photo of Watson well before showing him the photo montage, meant Wallace’s memory was contaminated.
“Having said that, we’re not saying, and we don’t say, that we believe Watson was innocent. We’re just saying the eyewitness evidence does not have positive probative value on that point.
“If anything, the early rejections [of Watson being the man on the water-taxi] tend to go against that notion that they are very good eyewitness evidence.”
Baker pressed Wells on why he used evidence from another person on the water-taxi, Hayden Morresy, who didn’t pick Watson from a photo montage, given Morresy acknowledged he’d only seen the man from the back.
Wells replied that the crucial factor was that Morresy described the mystery man as having hair down to his shoulders, which photos from the night clearly show Watson didn’t have.
Wells added that police must have believed Morresy could identify the mystery man, because they showed him the same photo montage as they showed Wallace.
Baker also raised this issue with Quigley-McBride, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, suggesting she and Wells had been selective and “misleading” in what they included from Morresy’s evidence.
Quigley-McBride insisted their report was based on science, not speculation.
Even by itself, Wallace’s identification of Watson was “not reliable evidence”, she said, but the fact Morresy didn’t identify Watson as the mystery man on the water-taxi, helped corroborate this.
Scott Watson was not present at the hearing.
On Tuesday, further witnesses will be heard on concerns about how two crucial hairs linked to Hope, which were found on Watson’s yacht, were handled and forensically tested.