Watson’s lawyer blasts police tactics
Double murderer Scott Watson’s lawyer has slammed the police tactics used to identify his client as the killer of Blenheim friends, Ben Smart and Olivia Hope in 1998.
Nick Chisnall, KC told the Court of Appeal it was clear that police exerted significant “interrogative and moral pressure” to get the key witness — water taxi driver Guy Wallace — to change his story.
Smart, 21, and Hope 17, haven’t been seen since getting out of the water taxi and on to a yacht moored in Endeavour Inlet in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1998. Their bodies and possessions have never been found.
Chisnall said despite the critical nature of Wallace’s identification, some 25 years ago, this was the first time the court has been asked to “square up to the manifold defects in the procedures adopted by police to secure the evidence”.
Police showing Wallace a photo of Watson in early January — which neither Watson’s trial lawyers or the jury were allegedly told about — only reinforced why Wallace’s identification was inadmissible, he said.
“Police concertedly and repeatedly used suggestive practices . . . to secure Mr Wallace’s identification of Watson” he told the court yesterday.
“The evidence unequivocally proves that police showed a single photo of Mr Watson to Mr Wallace in the investigation in January 1998. And given that a single photo was shown to other key witnesses, this was plainly an investigative strategy, rather than a misstep by an overzealous officer failing to follow instructions,” he said.
Then, three-and-a-half months later the police showed Watson in a photo montage, known as montage B.
Chisnall said the photo police used of Watson half-blinking made him stand out and was shown to Wallace after there had been “media saturation” of Watson’s image.
Yet he suggested that without Wallace identifying Watson in montage B, there was no identification at all and Wallace’s evidence would have lost its “vigour”.
Chisnall told the court Watson’s team were asking the court to allow the appeal, but in doing so not to order a retrial.
Watson is not attending the Court of Appeal hearing. Today Watson’s team will continue making their submissions to the court, before the Crown makes its case.