A typical day for me involved getting up at about 7 a.m. and having a quick breakfast while reading a list of things I had prepared the night before of what had to be done before court commenced for the day. At about 7.30 a.m. I’d head uncertainly into the fray of the war room. Some times it was a quiet place because a meeting was already being held somewhere else but usually it was a stampede of activity with everyone trying to get things done, whether it be photocopying, faxing, telephone calls, discussing the day ahead or all of the above at once. That sounds chaotic but it had an underlying structure where everyone had jobs to do and they did them.
David Bain would arrive at around 8.30 a.m., which brought some calm to the place; at the end of the day, the defence team was there to present a case in court on his behalf so the morning was when he made his quiet opinions about matters known to the team. What I will say is that he was very well mannered and polite and he seemed to under stand that I couldn’t really talk to him because it wasn’t my job and it just isn’t the ‘done thing’. That made me feel bad because I’m not naturally a rude person but in this situation, it wasn’t appropriate for me to be anything else. I didn’t even think it would be appropriate for me to explain that to him, so I just had to feel uncomfortable about it and he just had to put up with it. I usually made myself scarce for the morning conflabs — not really my place to be there for all that and it gave me an excuse to be away from the room and not appear rude.
Someone would then walk David Bain across to the court and deliver him into the hands of the court security. I think I walked him over twice when there was no one else available and we managed to get there without talking about anything apart from the weather. The departure of David Bain to court meant there was very little time left to finish preparing whatever it was, so there’d be a revitalised flourish of activity and the next thing you knew, they’d all be gone, leaving papers floating through the air, coming to rest like feathers in the cold silence. I say cold silence not because the silence felt cold but because it was so cold in the room. I wore my slippers all the time at the hotel because the concrete floors were so cold, even though they were carpeted. Why New Zealand hasn’t taken wholeheartedly to central heating, double glazing and insulation I will never know.
After a quick scurry across the quadrant to the court building, which, incidentally, is a horrible brown monstrosity that would give some English urban planners a run for their money, grabbing a quick cuppa from the coffee shop and settling into the court room, the day’s activities would begin.
I often wondered whether court observers, like the media or people in the public gallery, could tell when a day of contention was ahead. Unlike its portrayal on TV, trial progression can be a tedious and ponderous series of events. Information has to be read out so that it’s recorded on tape as part of the court record. In this case, the audio tapes were electronically sent to Auckland, at the other end of the country, where they were typed up and then sent back down to Christchurch for someone to print out and distribute the dozens of pages generated daily. Some times, all the lawyers disappeared off for a closed chambers meeting, leaving the rest of us sitting about waiting for some thing to happen. On some days, though, we knew before we got to court that the day ahead would be tense, interesting, nerve-wracking and some times unpredictable. On those days, the air felt prickly and there was little or no eye contact between members of the opposite legal teams. How tuned in were the media people to the atmosphere? Could they tell some thing juicy was coming? I don’t know because I never really spoke to any of them but I’d be interested to find out.
At 11.30 a.m. there was a coffee break, which involved someone hurtling across the road to gather supplies from the coffee shop and then everyone piling into a reserved room for a quick discussion about progress, then back into the court for the rest of the morning session. Lunch itself was usually a hurried affair with much discussion and debate, run back to court for the afternoon session, with a coffee break for intense discussions at about 3.30 p.m. and then finish court for the day at around five.
If only that had been where it ended, but that was when the real work of the day usually began. A de-brief was held for an hour or so until hunger drove everyone away before we reconvened at about 7.30 p.m. for more planning and discussion. Tasks assigned, most people dispersed to go and meet other people or to work on issues. Paul Morten and Matt Karam were usually wandering in and out of the war room until the early hours of the morning, dealing with legal technicalities.
Then it was up again at 7 o’clock the following morning to start all over again. Bear in mind that that was just my hourly input. It wasn’t unusual for people to have only a few hours’ sleep and spend the rest of the time preparing documents — because we all know that document preparation is a hugely time-costly exercise.
I also had most of the weekends off, whereas the defence team mostly worked seven days a week for the duration of the trial. It was just as well it ran over Easter so that everyone on all sides had a break.
The protocol for running a criminal trial dictates that the Crown has to make available to the defence the information on which it is going to rely for its case. That’s the way the New Zealand justice system works and it means there shouldn’t be any unexpected surprises from the Crown during presentation of their side of the case. However, there were several times when the Crown’s experts went ‘off brief’, which meant they started being asked questions by Crown prosecutors about things that hadn’t previously been mentioned and therefore the defence didn’t know were going to crop up.
This was an aspect of the way the case was run that was new to me; in England there would never be any question of a witness being allowed to talk about some thing new without the other side being given at least a week’s notice. The upshot was some full-on, late-night hours on the phone to England discussing new issues and getting copies of documents to experts and receiving comments back. Despite that, by far the most intense time for me was when the defence case was presented.
During the time that the prosecution presented its case, the atmosphere in the court room between the two sides had been relatively friendly and as relaxed as could be expected. Banter was usually relatively light. It is normal for the Crown case to take the most amount of time and the defence reacts to issues as they arise but as soon as the prosecution case ended and the defence case started, the atmosphere switched. It was more oppressive, darker and there was no edge of softness about it. It seemed to me that the prosecution didn’t like the idea of a lengthy defence case; there were 50-plus witnesses, which is far more than average. It was the prosecution’s turn to be reactionary.
In most trials, the type of pressure on each of the teams changes at the swap-over point. The whole experience of this case, for me, was mentally and physically exhausting, and I felt hugely responsible for the expert witnesses from England I had dragged into the case. To me, the coverage throughout the retrial felt generally negative towards the defence and I was worried that they would suffer at the hands of the media, which would be unexpected for them. In England, everyone accepts that expert witnesses are there for the benefit of the court, not those instructing them, so the media doesn’t generally give them grief and the opposition team treats them with respect. For whatever reason, this didn’t seem to me to be the case in this trial, so I was worried about that. Surprisingly, I wasn’t worried about giving my own evidence; the trial had been going on for so long by that point that I just wanted to get it over and done with.
The day I gave evidence, the weather was cold and wet with intermittent hailstorms. I sat outside the court room with two lay witnesses and talked to them in general terms about what it’s like to give evidence in court. Yes, you can sit down; no, it’s nothing like it is on CSI.
Then the court door opened and the clerk said, ‘Dr Anna Sandiford’, which never fails to set off a small voice in my head that says, Remind me again, why do I do this job? The walk up to the witness box is alway
s the hardest part because everyone watches you. Then you have to climb the stairs, open your briefcase, get out your papers, take the oath and face the crowd. Nothing feels more real. It’s raw and cold and there’s no way back.
The evidence I gave in the Bain retrial is described in an earlier chapter about sock prints. As far as giving evidence goes, the Bain retrial was no different from any other trial.
Nothing about the actual experience stands out as being any different from any other case, including the weather, apart from being able to sit down, but that’s a bonus not a detraction. I have to say, though, that despite being in Christchurch on and off for three months, the photo in the paper of me giving evidence was not the best I’ve ever seen. But then I always dislike photos of myself.
Of course, one of the main things that sticks in my mind was the day of the verdicts. I wasn’t sure whether I should stay around for the verdicts but I figured that I’d invested a lot of time and energy in the case and it would make a change to actually wait for the conclusion rather than hot-footing it off home at the first opportunity. So, despite not being on the clock any more, I decided that another day or so in Christchurch wouldn’t matter. As long as I was home by Saturday for a family gathering it would be fine.
I sat through a day and a half of the judge’s summing up, which was more than I had expected and clearly far more than the public in the TV viewing room had expected because there was a lot of fidgeting and muttering along the lines of Get on with it. The judge finished his summing up in the afternoon of 4 June and the jury chose not to start their deliberations that evening but to come back the next day. So, on Friday morning everyone gathered in court as normal, there was a bit of legal procedure and then the jury went off to the jury room just about morning tea time, which left a whole load of us, including media, standing there trying to decide what to do. It was anticlimactic.
I went back to my hotel room and tried to watch TV but couldn’t settle, so I went into the war room to try and pack some boxes of files, but couldn’t settle to that either. Eventually, I ended up going round the Rita Angus exhibition, which was showing at the Christchurch Gallery, with Paul Morten and his wife, Anna, until mid-afternoon of a beautiful sunny day. We were in the middle of the exhibition when Paul’s phone rang and we all froze, just as if we were playing musical statues. Then we remembered we were in a public place, surrounded by lots of people who were having a normal day. We started to move again, in a kind of ever-so-casual way. Paul answered the phone in a calm and collected manner, but it was to do with some thing else, so we started to meander around the paintings again.
There’s only so much meandering you can do, so eventually we gave it up and headed back to the hotel. I fussed around my hotel room, making tea, dipping biscuits, waiting for something to happen. When it got to half past four I had convinced myself that there was a good chance the jury wouldn’t be back that day. I took off my boots and got myself settled into a chair to watch a Harry Potter film on Sky. We didn’t have Sky at home and I figured I might as well make the most of it.
As the opening titles were rolling and I was deciding I had actually managed to find a film I’d not seen before, there was what sounded like an explosion on my door as Paul’s wife banged and shouted, ‘The jury’s got a verdict.’
Could I get my boots on my feet? Not a chance. They got all tangled up and I hobbled off across the quadrant to the court trying to telephone and text several people while putting on my cardigan, all at the same time. I rushed over with Helen Cull, Paul Morten and Anna Morten, with Helen saying she hoped we wouldn’t miss it and us reminding her it was highly unlikely they’d start without her. The front entrance of the court was packed and we had to run up eight flights of stairs because the lifts were so full. By the time I got in there, the lower part of the court room was packed and there was only standing room available.
As I looked around, I saw Joe Karam, his family and his partner, the lawyers’ partners, police officers, a lot of journalists and a small gathering of well-known media personalities. The jury was brought in and there was nothing to be read from their faces. Nothing at all. I expected I’d be able to tell one way or the other but there was nothing to be seen. They didn’t look at anyone in particular, although a couple of them checked the public gallery, maybe for friendly faces. As they settled in, David Bain was brought into the court room and put in the dock. Excuse the cliché but you could have cut the tension with a knife when the court clerk asked the jury forewoman if they had reached a unanimous decision. She looked around and checked with the others, which I hadn’t expected her to do (they don’t do that on the telly — serves me right for believing what I see on TV) and then she was asked how they found the defendant, David Cullen Bain, on the first charge, the murder of Robin Bain, to which she replied, ‘Not guilty.’
The whole court knew that if that charge was a not guilty then the other four would be too. There were cheers from the public gallery and an almost deafening clack of journalists’ laptop keyboards. I couldn’t see the faces of the prosecution lawyers because they stayed facing forwards, which meant they had their backs to the rest of the court. David Bain was struggling to hold it together as the rest of the verdicts were read out. And by 4.43 p.m. on Friday, 5 June 2009 it was over. Or was it?
I left the court room at that point, just out of interest to see how busy it had been upstairs in the public gallery and in the viewing room but was swept away in the tide of people coming the other way. I heard lots of people saying it was the right verdict and I saw a few faces I recognised because they’d spent more time watching this retrial than me.
Then there was the media scrum afterwards and the attempt to get out of the building. The front doors were closed and locked so we had to go out of the side entrance — I got the distinct impression that this kind of media response in high-profile cases wasn’t unusual at this court because the security guards were well organised and, as they had been throughout, very nice. It wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to go through the doors with the defence team so I squeezed through the side door and into the waiting throng of humanity that had materialised in the advancing twilight. A pregnant woman was so overcome with emotion she threw up in the bushes. People were milling about, talking on phones and waiting for the defence team to come out of the building. I have to admit to walking off at that point because I couldn’t hear anything from where I was and it was more interesting for me to watch the watchers than it was to hear what was being said at the microphone. Not because I didn’t want to, but I’d just spent several months with the defence team — I could always ask them what was said and I knew it would be on the TV later on. And on and on …
Most people were on the phone. One man was shouting into a phone he had lodged between his ear and his shoulder and was texting into each of two other phones he was holding — I admired his manual dexterity. Someone asked me if I was the doctor. When I asked which one and found they had meant Laniet’s GP they were disappointed, and I felt strangely anonymous, which was an odd thing to feel, considering that I was.
After the speeches had been made and the initial furore had died down, Joe Karam, David Bain and the defence team took their leave and walked back to the hotel. Unfortunately, one of the reporters had missed them leaving and asked me if they’d got in a car and driven off. I said yes because I thought that if she was really a good reporter she shouldn’t have taken her eye off the biggest story of the year while it walked off down the road — surrounded, I might add, by a massive entourage of cameras and lights, the glow of which could be seen across the park. I wandered back to the hotel and sat down for five minutes in my room to gather my thoughts.
What were my thoughts? I didn’t really have any. Here I was, at the heart of one of New Zealand’s biggest ever court and news stories and I had absolutely no thoughts whatsoever. Strange. Or maybe it’s normal. With hindsight, I think it was just pure exhaustion. All I did know was that I was tired but I went upstair
s to Joe Karam’s suite to see what was happening. What met my eyes was an open door and what seemed to be a free-for-all of people arriving, people I hadn’t seen at the court or in the public gallery, so I tinkered with the idea of whether they’d just wandered in of their own accord (apparently some of them had) and whether anyone actually knew them all. My thoughts were soon interrupted by the arrival of John Campbell, Carol Hirschfeld and a cameraman or two. As John Campbell interviewed Joe Karam, I was leaning against a wall at the back of the room when my phone rang in my pocket. I sneaked out of the sliding doors onto the balcony to answer it, whereupon a friend of mine announced he could see me on TV but, oh my goodness, where had I gone now? I told him I’d come outside because some idiot had rung me when I was on the TV.
The rest of the evening is a blur of exhaustion. It reaches a point when you realise that the only thing you have in common with anyone in the room is this case. I had no idea what things most of the defence team did or liked outside work and I had no energy left to find out; I would have been quite happy to sit and watch the spectacle before me. I eventually went to bed far later than I should have done and I remember being woken up at about 5 a.m. by revellers singing rude songs.
The next thing I remember was checking out of the hotel to go home as TV crews from all the major stations plus radio passed through the foyer to go and interview Joe Karam and David Bain in the garden. The TV3 news presenter told me I looked tired and I was so exhausted I could barely form a reply so I got in the taxi and went to the airport. As I sat waiting for my flight to be called, I played a little game. I had a newspaper on my knee in which were several photographs, including my own. I wondered if anyone would recognise me. They didn’t, so I was happy to fall asleep on the plane with my head lolling, safe in the knowledge that no one would point at me with any recognition of my having recently been involved with the Trial of the Century.
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