The day Alan Hall was convicted of murdering a man in an Auckland home, Hall’s family got into their car and drove away from the court in complete silence.
“It was traumatic,” Geoff Hall, Alan’s younger brother says, speaking to the Guardian 36 years after the event. “It was like white shock – the blood has left your body, you have tunnel vision, everything blurs around you.”
It was 1986, and Hall, then aged 23, had just been convicted of stabbing Arthur Easton to death in the 52-year-old’s Papakura home. He would go on to spend 19 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
The portrait painted by police of Hall as a murderer was nothing like the brother Geoff knew – the brother who would save all his money to buy his family a plastic swimming pool for their back garden, or to buy a brand new microwave for his mother to make life easier. Geoff remembers thinking: “What is it they see, that I don’t see?”
It was this feeling – that the police had got it so wrong – that compelled Hall’s family to fight the conviction. It was a battle they committed to for 36 years, right up until last week when New Zealand’s highest court – the supreme court – quashed Hall’s conviction because there had been a “substantial miscarriage of justice”. Chief Justice Helen Winkelmann told the court that the crown’s departure from accepted standards must “either be the result of extreme incompetence or of a deliberate and wrongful strategy to secure conviction”.
The fight to clear Hall’s name has come at a substantial cost to Hall and his family – emotionally, psychologically and economically. Hall’s mother, Shirley, spent the rest of her life advocating for her son’s innocence, and sold the family home in Papakura to pay for investigators to clear his name. She died in 2012.
Last week, when the crown gave its verdict and banned any appeals against the decision, the Hall family’s reaction was the opposite to that shell-shocked car ride in 1986. “We all stood up and applauded,” Geoff says, and while they retained composure; on the inside, “roman candles were going off”. “It was monumental, and it was really important for all of the family to be there.”
At one point, as people were filing out of the court, Geoff looked for his brother, but he had vanished from the room. “Alan was gone. He got his freedom and off he goes,” he laughs. That evening, on the flight home from Wellington to Auckland, Alan celebrated with a glass of wine – the second glass in 12 years, on his second flight in 40 years.
Geoff says Alan can be hard to read, which he puts down to his autism diagnosis. “He doesn’t have high or low emotion ... in that way other people can show, when they cry or are laughing,” he says. “This was important to him, but it’s not like he was running around yelling ‘I’m free! I’m free!’. He’s just straight back into his routine.”
But along with the family’s relief, there was sadness over what could never be fixed and the ongoing trauma to which the justice system had subjected Hall and his family.
“If the exoneration came within the first 10 years of Alan’s conviction, we would have absolutely been jumping around,” Geoff says. However, after multiple setbacks, “the mindset changes and you learn to accept it, and you become desensitised to the horror of what had happened to him”.
Still, the nearly four-decade fight gave Geoff meaning to his days: “You wake up in the morning and it’s like, ‘Righty-oh, we’ve got something really worthwhile to go for, something that’s really important.’”
‘Deliberate’ failures during trial
The miscarriage of justice was so egregious that crown prosecutors made the extraordinary submission to the supreme court that Hall’s convictions ought to be quashed, and that it would not seek a retrial. It cited the “unacceptable truth” that an “unanswerable cause of miscarriage” had taken place.
Key evidence was not disclosed in the original trial and police interviewing tactics used on Hall, who was later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, were deemed oppressive, unfair, and conducted without a lawyer present.
On the night of the murder, and in subsequent interviews, a key witness told police the man he saw running from the property was “definitely dark-skinned, he was not white”. He said the man was Māori, and even when Hall, who is pākehā – or European descent – became the subject of police’s attention, the witness maintained his observation. This description was echoed by other witnesses who also described the culprit as a large, right-handed, man, unlike Hall who is left-handed and was of slight build.
According to the crown’s own submissions, reference to the key witness’s description was removed from his witness statement, without his knowledge.
Following his conviction, Hall served nearly nine years in prison and was released on parole in the mid-1990s. He breached his parole conditions in 2012 and was sent back to prison for another 10 years, up until his release in March this year.
Fresh search for the truth
The fight to reveal the truth is over. With Hall exonerated, Geoff is thinking “now what?”
For the Halls, a new fight begins. “We’re switching our focus to, why did this happen and who [committed the murder],” he says.
The solicitor general has asked for an investigation into what part the crown played in what is now considered one of the New Zealand’s most significant miscarriages of justice – making it the first time in the country’s history that crown law has turned investigators on itself. Meanwhile, Alan Hall is now preparing to file for compensation – if successful, the sum could exceed that of other cases “by a very wide margin” Hall’s lawyer Nick Chisnall said, following the court’s decision.
The previous highest compensation payout in New Zealand’s legal history was awarded to Teina Pora, after the Privy Council quashed his rape and murder conviction in 2015. Pora, who spent 21 years in prison for crimes he did not commit, was paid NZ$3.5m (£1.8m).
Geoff commends the crown’s quick decision to investigate and hopes that it will result in those involved – the police and prosecution – being cross-examined under oath, “because from what I’ve seen, it was blatant and it was wrong in every way”, he says.
Alan doesn’t want an apology, Geoff says. “What would mean something to him is reopening the investigation into the murder and also investigating the officers that did this.
Easton’s family have suffered too because they have not seen justice served, says Geoff. “They are all victims of this as well, and unfortunately, they had to suffer while we were in our fight process, because they believed in the justice system, they believed in the police and then they had to find out that belief was wrong.”
