Forty years after the murder and subsequent police investigation that led to it, the case of Alan Hall returned to court yesterday, writes Henry Oliver in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.
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The case of Alan Hall – one of New Zealand’s most notorious wrongful convictions – returned to court yesterday, 40 years after the horrific murder and subsequent police investigation that led to it. As reported by The Post’s Mike White, two former police officers with interim name suppression, aged 76 and 83, appeared in Auckland’s High Court charged with wilfully attempting to pervert the course of justice.
It is the first time, following an amendment to a suppression order, that it can be reported the defendants are former police officers involved in the original investigation. Both have pleaded not guilty. A third person charged has since died.
What happened
In October 1985, Arthur Easton was stabbed to death by an intruder in his Papakura home. Easton’s two teenage sons were also attacked. Two months later, police focused on Alan Hall – a Pākehā man who lived nearby and had owned a bayonet and balaclava similar to items found at the scene. Hall, who was later diagnosed with autism, was interrogated without a lawyer and gave conflicting accounts under police pressure.
In 1986, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Despite numerous appeals, he spent nearly 18 years in prison and nearly 18 years on parole. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned his conviction – also reported on by Mike White, who followed Hall during the appeal – finding a “substantial miscarriage of justice”. Hall was subsequently awarded $4.9m in compensation – the largest wrongful conviction payout in New Zealand history.
The prosecution’s case
Prosecutors say the Supreme Court’s question has now been answered: this was deliberate. The key allegation centres on the treatment of evidence from witness Ronald Turner, who told police on three separate occasions that the person he saw running near the crime scene was Māori and approximately six feet tall. Hall is Pākehā and five feet seven. That description was never disclosed to the defence, the trial judge, or the jury.
Other witnesses – including one of Easton’s sons – also initially described the attacker as Māori, leading police to focus early inquiries in that direction before shifting to Hall. The Crown prosecutor told the judge that the omission of Turner’s ethnicity description was deliberate, not an oversight. “Without these departures,” he said, as reported by RNZ’s Matthew Theunissen, “there was insufficient evidence either to charge Mr Hall or to convict him. That, your Honour, is how simple this case is.”
The defence
Defence lawyer David Jones KC, representing the older defendant, rejected the Crown’s framing, saying the trial “didn’t turn on what Mr Turner did or did not say,” adding the subsequent approach to the evidence was “emotive, non-contextual, and lopsided”. He argued Turner had seen someone running in the same neighbourhood but not directly from the crime scene, and questioned whether the person was connected to the murder at all.
The defence also noted – as reported by Craig Kapitan for the NZ Herald – that it was “clearly in the public domain” at the time that two other witnesses had initially described the attacker as Māori, undermining the Crown’s suggestion that Turner’s suppressed description was uniquely damaging. He pointed to other evidence linking Hall to the crime, including items left at the scene that Hall admitted owning and the inconsistency of his explanations for why they were no longer at his home. He accused the Crown of “reverse engineering” a prosecution backwards from the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision rather than assessing the case as investigators would have understood it in the 1980s.
Hall and one of his brothers attended the first day of the trial.
