In a post-Teina Pora, post-Alan Hall, post-David Bain world, it’s getting harder to treat convictions as beyond question simply because they have survived the test of time. Forensic scientist Ruben Miller asks what we should now make of the justice system.
New Zealand used to treat old murder convictions as immovable objects. Once a jury had spoken, once appeals had been exhausted, once enough years had passed, we filed the case away as history. The verdict itself became part of the cultural furniture.
I think that instinct is dying.
Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision to quash David Tamihere’s convictions, 37 years after two Swedish tourists – Sven Höglin and Heidi Paakkonen – disappeared in the Coromandel, lands in a country that no longer automatically trusts the solidity of “settled” justice.
The quashed convictions are not arriving into the New Zealand of the 1990s. They are arriving into the New Zealand of 2026: a country that has spent the past decade watching some of its most notorious convictions bend, fracture or completely collapse under modern scrutiny.
There is an unease in New Zealand now: a growing public recognition that some of our most notorious historical convictions have survived less because they were beyond doubt, and more because institutions are structurally reluctant to revisit their own mistakes.
We now live in a post-Teina Pora, post-Alan Hall, post-David Bain legal culture. The public has watched too many supposedly final verdicts unravel under the weight of false witnesses, flawed identifications, suppressed evidence, tunnel vision and case theories that changed beyond recognition once new facts emerged.
The creation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2020 has fundamentally changed the culture and politics around historical convictions in New Zealand. The existence of an independent body dedicated to miscarriages of justice has strengthened a once radical perspective that old verdicts should remain open to modern doubt.
That changes how a ruling like the Tamihere one is received.
Thirty years ago, a quashed conviction in a notorious murder case might have felt like a pretty, shocking rupture. Now it feels disturbingly familiar and I think that familiarity should concern us, because what the Supreme Court is really saying here is about more than the fate of one man. The court’s concern was not simply that a prison informant later turned out to have lied. It was that the Crown theory evolved so radically over time that the convictions were effectively being upheld on a story no jury had ever been asked to assess. This strikes at the heart of public confidence.
Juries convict on narratives. They do not decide abstract guilt in a vacuum. They are asked to weigh a coherent sequence: where the victims were, where the accused was, what the witness saw, what the timeline means, what the forensic geography supports.
When decades later the map changes, the witness collapses, the timeline stretches across multiple locations, and the Crown theory no longer resembles the original trial story, the justice system has to ask a question: when does preserving a conviction become preserving institutional ego?
That is the real feeling that swirls around cases like Tamihere and Scott Watson. It is not only legal; it is cultural. New Zealand is becoming less comfortable with the mythology of the infallible historical conviction. We are more willing to acknowledge that old cases often reflect the investigative culture of their time and that might include deference to police narratives, overconfidence in eyewitnesses, informant evidence treated as gold, and a judiciary often more focused on finality than open-mindedness.
Historical cases are vulnerable to what I think of as narrative inertia. Once an early theory becomes dominant, every later fact risks being unconsciously flexed to support it. The danger is no longer fabrication in the overt sense, it is a perhaps subtler human bias: the inability to imagine a different map once the first one has been drawn.
That is why these cases keep returning – not because the public loves conspiracy or (not only) because notorious names drive headlines, it’s because modern scrutiny keeps whacking into old certainty.
The real political significance of the Tamihere decision is that it further erodes the old social notion that verdicts become more trustworthy simply by surviving time. Sometimes time does the opposite. Sometimes it reveals that what looked like certainty was only institutional rigidity.
And the more New Zealand sees that pattern repeated, the harder it becomes to treat any historical conviction as beyond question simply because it is old. That may be uncomfortable for the justice system, but it should be a sign of a healthier public culture.
Trust in justice should never come from pretending verdicts are sacred. It should come from knowing they can still be challenged when the story no longer survives the evidence.
