Sometime near the end of 2020, Asher Emanuel, Wellington-based lawyer and journalist, began conducting field work for a new book to capture a view of the criminal justice system through the eyes of those who exist within it. His research method was to embed himself, for two years, dictaphone and spiralbound notebook in hand, with the defence lawyers of the Wellington branch of the Public Defence Service. The resulting book, The Valley, is a magnificent work of journalism.
A tome of 476 pages, it narrates the lives of an ensemble of these real-life characters as they exist in and around the Wellington Criminal Courts cluster, mostly told through ungarnished prose and direct dialogue that has been meticulously transcribed from his interviews. There are three characters at the centre of the book: Lewis Skerrett, lawyer with PDS; and two of his clients, Nathan Morley, and Rikihana Wallace (not their real names, all of the characters in the book are anonymised). I work as a criminal lawyer in Wellington, and the similarity of the narrative to my daily experience was a little too close at times. Nathan and Rikihana are typical of recidivist offenders, in fact, for the first 50 pages or so I suspected they might be my own clients (they aren’t). They have long conviction histories, childhood trauma, mental health problems, substance abuse issues, they have been in and out of the system in one way or another since they were teens, and when we meet them at the start of the book, they are in trouble again.
The Valley is not a sensationalist account, but a realistic depiction of the percussive trundling of low-level court processes – of policing, cycles of violence and drug addiction, and rehabilitation. The finished work has no heroic arc or tidy resolution, it presents its world as nondidactically as possible, with no cliffhangers, no literary flourish, no flashy trials – this is the justice system as it is, like a river: once you’re in, you’re in. You can resist its tow for a time, cling to the banks, but eventually it will carry you down its inexorable path until it flushes you out at the other end.
The gravitational centre of this system are the Judge’s lists – which act as a sort of sorting house for criminal prosecutions. These are where Lewis Skerrett makes most of his Court appearances in the book, in front of a Judge who must try to get through twenty-five or thirty matters in a day, many of which will be inane administrative pleas, bail breaches, non-appearances, arrest warrants, sometimes referred to by those who work at Court as “the churn”. Unlike Lewis Skerrett who works in Hutt Valley (the eponym of the book’s title), I work mostly in Wellington District Court, where there are enough arrests, bail breaches and administrative matters arising that there is a Judge’s list of some kind every day of the week, most often in Courtroom One.
Courtroom One is a long windowless room, barren walls, lit like a TV-studio. Lawyers sit in rows, heads bowed over laptops and papers towards the raised stage of the registrar, then, above and behind, the Judge – a floating head on a black robed body – seated beneath the heraldic symbol of the colony: St Edward’s Crown over an Aryan blonde in white, and a Māori rangatira, standing Dexter and Sinister to the shield, adorned with three ships, a sheaf of wheat, stars, hammers, and a dead sheep. Police occupy the foremost table, which is loaded with the day’s case files, tied in bundles with pink and green ribbon.
The highly stylised and formalised elements of ritual are everywhere: movements and sequences are repeated; space is cut up into zones; speech is affected and formal, lawyers bow as they ferry in and out of the room. If you are speaking to the Judge you stand, and there is a sort of rhythm to it: the dry, laconic call and response of Judge and lawyer, shuffling paper, the thud of the Judge’s stamp, followed with the conventional lawyerly summation: “as Your Honour pleases”. All of this ceremony sits in jarring contrast to the business itself, the exercise of state power, a contrast that is accented by the muffled banging, yelling and groaning which often emanates from the cells that are located somewhere behind the walls, dutifully ignored by everyone in the courtroom.
Then, there are delineations of class and race, not formalised, but normalised. The list Judges in Wellington are all Pākeha, or look Pākeha. There are women Judges, but they are much fewer. For my first few months of work, I found it impossible, upon returning to the office, to explain which Judge I had appeared in front of. There is only so far one can go after, male, grey hair, glasses, sometimes resulting in comic misrecognitions. The lawyers too, for the most part, are white (the Law Society holds ethnicity information for 96% of lawyers, NZ European is most represented at 75%), and, an outsized proportion of the defendants are Māori. I recall in my first week having an odd knot in my stomach in the otherwise silent Courtroom as, through the walls from the cells, came a particularly moving rendition of Ka Pioioi. Too, class divisions are emphasised by the continued use of formal dress, which contrasts starkly with the run-down appearance of some defendants, many of whom live in poverty.
All of this – the formal dress, the barren walls, the unreal, studio lighting, the unusual speech – makes it easy to forget that this room is continuous with, and part of, the world outside. On my way to Court one morning, I saw four Police run out of a car and tackle a man in a blanket to the ground, then later that afternoon, saw the same man appear in the dock, flattening his fringe with his hand. Someone had taken his blanket.
“Sorry about the hair, your Honour.”
“Don’t mention it, your hair is the least of your worries.”
This distancing effect is, in part, the point, because the Courtroom is where we symbolically address the social rupture that crime represents. Ritual offers a predictable framework through which society can assure itself that criminal behaviour is being addressed, and that social order will return. Person does bad, person is punished, order returns.
The Valley is such an expansive work that it is hard to make broad statements about what it does, but for me, it is an attempt to make this space of the Courtroom continuous with the world outside. It visualises a system, not as a sterile schematic, but as a neural network of actors, each bringing their own particular traumas, gripes, prejudices to bear upon the whole, brilliantly illuminating the sometimes-nonsensical ways that this process is enacted – by whom, for whom, against whom.
So, it is also a book about storytelling – about who can speak, and when, and how the mode of telling is governed by, and produces, its own rules, which, like syntax, inform what is able to be heard, and dictate the politics of plausibility. Near the middle of the book, Lewis laments the nonsense of it all: “It was the nonsense that really got to him. At times like this, he thought it was the worst possible job.” One of Nathan’s more serious charges is for a burglary of chainsaw equipment in Stokes Valley. The most damning evidence is dashcam footage of Nathan at the address loading items into the back seat of a tan-coloured Toyota Corona. When Lewis speaks to Nathan about it, he must prevent Nathan from oversharing, lest he accidentally reveal that he is the person in the video (ruling out the defence of identity).
At times this can be tricky, because Nathan is more preoccupied with telling the full story:
‘If I’m gonna have to plead to that, then I want an opportunity to tell the goddamn truth about it.’
Lewis nodded. At this juncture, he’d rather not know what the truth was.
Lewis eventually manages to get the charge amended down to theft. Nathan pleads guilty, and is then free to reveal to Lewis that the Police had it all wrong. He says that he and his co-offender had been enforcing a debt and went to the property to confiscate an indoor cannabis grow setup. The chainsaw equipment had been invented by the occupant of the house, presumably to commit insurance fraud. The Police version of the story – as it is narrated in the Police Summary of Facts – is read aloud in open Court by the Judge at Nathan’s sentencing, and thereby canonised in the Court record. All other versions of the story fall away.
“People think, you know, we’re talking about truth,” Judge Wallis tells Emanuel, in the epilogue, referring to complainants who feel their story has been repudiated by a not guilty verdict, “It’s not about the truth. This may well have happened. The question is whether or not they’ve proved it beyond reasonable doubt.” Reasonable doubt is a slippery concept in the context of low-stakes offending like this, and undoubtedly, sometimes the reverse can be true, that what is provable might not necessarily be the truth. Throughout this book, we hear the same stories repeated multiple times by different characters, each telling changes the meaning of what happened, and each telling is inflected by the motives of the teller.
Criminal charges are highly abstracted forms of storytelling (‘A used force against B, with intent’) but in reality, life is messy, time is a continuum, human memory is fallible. “There are never any linear stories,” one of the characters in the book sagely observes. Delays in Court process are not only cruel for both victims and defendants, but the effect of time on memory can make aspects of the trial process farcical. The persistent emphasis on the use of cross-examination, for example, “once described as the greatest legal engine for discovering truth”, is these days said to be “more likely to cited as evidence of the legal profession’s collective self-delusion” (McDonald, 2012). Most people overestimate their ability to spot a lie: one study from 2006 found that the average person discriminates lies from truth at a level slightly better than flipping a coin.
Mid-way through the book, Nathan is charged with assault for threatening his mother Shelley with an axe. The allegation is that he and Shelley had a drunken argument, and as Shelley tried to leave the house in her car, Nathan jumped on the bonnet and put an axe through the windscreen. Nathan denies this and says that Shelley tried to drive the car at him after he tried to stop her drink driving. He clung to the bonnet, she put on the brakes and he flew off. He says after she left the car, he put the axe through the windscreen to stop her driving again. Later in the book, however, Nathan says that the axe was in there before Shelley got in. When Nathan is sobered up in prison he reflects on the incident again. It had felt reasonable at the time. “But now he could see his thought process had been far from normal.”
Emanuel wasn’t there for the incident so we don’t get to know the truth. Given that Nathan and Shelley were so drunk, it could be that neither story is accurate, the truth might be somewhere in the middle. It seems possible that Nathan could have used the axe in the way he described, not meaning to scare Shelley, but prevent her from driving, while Shelley could plausibly have interpreted this as a threat.
In a quiet moment at the end of the book, Lewis leafs through the file”
He stopped at a photo of Shelley, sitting in the Vitz, looking out of the frame, smoking a rollie. It had been taken at night-time, illuminated by a flash, an axe head through the shattered windscreen. Lewis shook his head and closed the file. That was never going to hit her, he thought.
The politics of storytelling is also evident at the level of the book’s authorship. The story is derived from Emanuel’s personal observations, but he has chosen to remove himself from the text. In the final chapter of the book, ‘About the Research’, Emanuel says the decision was “both stylistic and a matter of principle. It’s not about me.” A few pages later he writes: “Ultimately, I think the best way to deal with uncomfortable realities is to present as comprehensive a picture as possible and trust the reader to reach sensible and humane judgments.” The book is written in third person omniscient – narrated from the perspective of an invisible, disembodied narrator – but in a work composed from in-person interviews, this choice would have made the writing awkward at times, and Emanuel’s voice is conspicuous in its absence. As Henry David Thoreau pointed out, it is always the first person that is speaking, even when the ‘I’ is omitted.
In one of the most moving scenes in the book, Rikihana is released on bail to a boarding house in the Hutt. WINZ have arranged a green food card to get him started. After settling in, he heads out for food, but he’s banned from all of the supermarkets in the area. He walks the streets alone, trying a number of dairies and takeaways, none of which are able to accept the WINZ card.
In the end, he resolves to go into the supermarket anyway:
–just ninja it, he thought. But just as he was planning his entry, he saw someone he knew who agreed to go in and buy food for him.
In the endnotes we discover that this someone is Emanuel, who has been with Rikihana the whole time, and in the end, offers to go into the supermarket rather than let him risk entering just a few hours after he’s been released from prison. The note also records that before this, Rikihana tried to buy dinner for Emanuel, but the card wasn’t accepted, sweetly implying a kind of reciprocal kindness between the two, a friendship.
There are a number of endnotes like this, and after a while I found myself reading the narrative on two levels, with this ghostly figure of Emanuel walking alongside the characters. I stress that this is an incredible work of reporting, a beautiful book, a masterpiece even – but this is also a story that is being told by a particular person, at a particular time, and the resulting narrative is inextricably linked to Emanuel’s own hopes, beliefs, fears, and his prejudices. From what I know about Emanuel (his reputation as a lawyer – I don’t know him personally), his personal and professional observations on what he experienced and how his relationships with the characters developed would have been valuable to readers, and would have avoided what I see as the main problem with this style choice: that he has written the character’s thoughts as inner monologue, when, in fact, they were spoken to someone holding a dictaphone and a notebook.
To be clear, it is not as if Emanuel didn’t consider this style choice deeply. In the ‘About the Research’ chapter, he relates a conversation he had with a senior journalist who he told about the choice.
‘But you are in the book,’ he said, grinning. ‘You chose every word.’ And he’s right — though I do not appear in the main text, I saw, heard and recorded it all. I decided who to talk to and wrote it up. A different author would have written a different book.
In the final chapter Emanuel describes how he set out with ethical ground rules.
“I wouldn’t assist people […] My purpose was to report, not to intervene, and my presence should not alter the course of events. But circumstances tested me and I gave way.” For me, the fact that he, the vanished narrator, was corrupted by circumstance is a part of the story, and his compassion universalises the plight of the characters within it. I am perhaps being too critical, but I am a reader who thinks a lot about the elusive concept of ‘voice’, which floats somewhere between the narrator and the implied reader. Flicking between the endnotes, and the ‘About the Research’ chapter, I felt an intense warmth and gratitude to Emanuel for this book – for the difficulty of the work, the intensity of his focus, his fealty to his intention, and the execution of something so vast and important that he felt compelled by selflessness to remove himself. I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s observation on biography, that sometimes the figure that has been most completely and most subtly displayed is that of the author.
It isn’t entirely clear how Emanuel selected Lewis, Nathan, and Rikihana as his primary subjects, but in the epilogue he says that it was only fairly late in his time in the field that he saw the “coherence in this trio – all born in the Valley and at the beginning of a new political era.” From this I can infer that there many, many more stories that have been left out from this book than what we read. As all writers know, not all details are created equal, there are some moments that carry more truth value than others, and it is the writer’s job to lovingly collect and arrange them. Emanuel’s choices are what bind these episodes together, it is in their arrangement that the truth value of the book is derived.
In one particularly lovely exchange near the beginning of the book, Nathan, avoiding detox appointments, goes on a wild bender, almost wrecking his car in the process. He makes it home in his car, now a smouldering wreck in the driveway of Shelley’s house. The wreckers take it away, leaving an outline of broken glass and soot.
Shelley hunched over her broom and swept the driveway.
‘I’ll finish that later, Mum,’ Nathan yelled from the house.
‘No,’ Shelley said, and went on sweeping. ‘The glass’ll get in the dogs’ feet.’
The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City by Asher Emanuel (Bridget Williams Books, $39.99), is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to coverage of this extraordinary new book. Tuesday: the opening chapter. Wednesday: Steve Braunias interviews the author.
