Lewis Skerrett sat drinking coffee in the Public Defence Service tea room in Wellington. It was a Tuesday, November seventeenth. A busy day ahead. He slouched low in the plastic chair, his long legs sticking out into the room, crossed at the ankles. By 8.30am he’d had two coffees and a bowl of muesli. He preferred to eat breakfast at work where the milk was paid for by the Ministry of Justice.
A defence lawyer in the office’s Hutt Valley team, Lewis was due in the valley at 9am for two new clients—both sex offenders—appearing for breaches of court orders relating to their offending. He hadn’t met either of them. He flicked through the files absently. One of the clients went by the name Blessed Samuels. He raised his eyebrows. Not a good start, he thought.
After the valley, he needed to be back in Wellington for a 2.15pm jury trial callover—a routine administrative hearing for cases proceeding to jury trial—for a client who’d been charged with unlawfully taking a motorcycle and possession of methamphetamine. There were a few problems with the defence case. The bike had the wrong number plates and had been roughly repainted. Worse still, it was being turned on and off with a screwdriver sticking out of the ignition.
Lewis ruminated. He was going to get chewed out by the judge, Robert Wallis, for having a case like that in the callover. Judge Wallis, known for his short temper, would take one look at the file and demand to know why a lowly charge of unlawful taking, with such a weak defence, should go to all the trouble and expense of a jury trial.
If there was a silver lining, it was that the prosecutor was a novice and in cases like this there was a real possibility that no one had remembered to test the substance police said was methamphetamine. If so, the defence could ask the judge to dismiss the possession charge part-way through the trial because there was no evidence the substance was actually meth. But then the jury would know that the defendant had been found with a quantity of white powdered substance, plastic baggies, and a troubling amount of cash. Not helpful.
The alternative would be to plead guilty to the meth charge ahead of trial—even if the evidence was lacking—to keep those facts away from the jury.
Lewis stopped his manager as she passed through the tea room and asked her what she thought. Victoria Keller had been a prosecutor for the best part of a decade before moving to the Public Defence Service. Now she was as tough an advocate for the defendant as she had been for the state, perhaps for the simple reason that, as a colleague observed, she didn’t like to lose.
Keller hardly paused before answering. The dismissal application was the better strategy, she reckoned. If the charge was dismissed, the judge would tell the jury to ignore evidence they’d heard about it. She was confident the jury would follow directions.
Lewis shook his head and smiled. “That’s the prosecution in you, Victoria.”
He tipped out the rest of his coffee and went to get keys for one of the work cars parked in the garage a few floors below. Taking the urban motorway out of Wellington city, past the port and the railyards, he drove along the narrow seaside highway towards Lower Hutt.
Before him stretched the Hutt Valley. First the Petone shore and the flat lands of Alicetown, further east the industrial lots of Seaview. As the highway approached the city centre, where Lewis would pull off for court, it met the river and wound up the valley along the foot of the western hills. Near the centre was the wealthy suburb of Woburn with a handful of manor houses behind high fences, but further north the concentration of wealth decreased. If Lewis kept driving, he would pass Belmont Domain, in the middle-class suburb where he was born and grew up. Then, as the hills rose and the valley narrowed, the working-class suburbs of Naenae, Epuni, Taitā—addresses he often listed on his clients’ legal aid forms—and, eventually, the city of Upper Hutt.
At the Hutt Valley District Court Lewis put in his morning appearances then returned to Wellington, all the while unaware that his regular client Nathan Morley was being held in the cells below.
Early the next day Lewis leaned on the cubicle divider by his colleague’s desk—a corner space in the PDS office’s best location, overlooking Lambton Quay and the Supreme Court. “Shaun says I’m doing Morley,” he said. Shaun Paddison was the Wellington public defender and the boss of the Wellington PDS office and had assigned Lewis to act for Nathan on his new charges.
Briar Reynolds looked up from the Morley file note she was working on. She had been at the Hutt Valley court the afternoon before when the duty lawyers realised Nathan was still in the cells and Lewis had left, and had temporarily picked up the case.
She explained that Nathan had been in custody since he was arrested and interviewed by Constable Peters late on Friday night, after which he had been charged with burglary. He had spent the weekend in Rimutaka. Judge Ron Booth was willing to make time in that morning’s sentencing list to hear a bail application for Nathan.
“Judge Booth is on sentencing? Good,” Lewis said.
Another of Lewis’s clients was being sentenced that morning for taking a motor scooter. The client seemed to have difficulty controlling his emotions and was prone to outbursts in court. Booth—rosy-cheeked and jovial, and also a judge in the Family Court—was the right judge for the case, Lewis thought, provided his client could behave himself.
Lewis thanked her for handling the Morley file the day before. “Do you want to send me a—”
“I’ll send you a memo,” Briar said. She was the office’s high achiever, the walls above her desk Blu-Tacked with a variety of professional development certificates and awards.
Lewis was relieved. He’d only expected a simple email. Different strokes, he thought. His own approach to legal practice was less exacting, but when people challenged him on the state of his files, he’d protest. The notes, actually, they’re not that bad, he’d say. They’re there, if you know where to look.
When Lewis and his client entered courtroom one, a cavernous room with light blue walls, no natural light and a cramped public gallery, Judge Booth was busy declining bail for a man who stood muttering darkly in the dock. But his lawyer, a young woman with a slight stutter, wasn’t taking no for an answer.
From his perch on the judge’s bench, Booth cut her off impatiently. “There is nothing you could say that would convince me to admit this man to bail. It’s game over.”
The defendant tried to speak, but Booth wasn’t having it. “Take him downstairs, please.”
“What’s happening?” the man called as the officers hauled him out the back.
The court registrar, who sat below the judge directing the flow of cases, studied the list. She asked that day’s prosecutor, Sergeant Dennis Kerr, a uniformed policeman, what he was still waiting for.
“Morley,” Kerr said. Nearing retirement after long service, the stringy, redheaded sergeant was a fixture of the court, and his accent and old-man mullet marked him out as a genuine valley resident.
“Who’s counsel on that?”
“It’s me,” Lewis said.
Kerr said nothing, and looked the other way.
A few minutes later, Lewis took a seat in the audio-visual suite and dialled Rimutaka Prison. The call connected and Nathan appeared, sitting on a stool in a small room and wearing a cheap surgical face mask and blue disposable coveralls. “Lewis!” Nathan said, waving at the camera. “Are you going to be my lawyer?”
“Probably on this Hutt charge,” Lewis said. “While it’s in the valley, I’ll act on it.” For the past two years Nathan had been one of Lewis’s more complicated and time-consuming clients.
They knew each other well. Nathan was thirty-three and Lewis thirty-four, and both had grown up in the valley, albeit at different ends—Nathan in Upper Hutt and Lewis in Lower Hutt.
Initially, Lewis was assigned to defend Nathan on a charge of breaching his release conditions. Nathan had just finished serving a sentence of imprisonment for arson and was prohibited from associating with his mother Shelley, a condition he found impossible to comply with. The arson wasn’t what it sounded like. Nathan had gotten drunk one night, taken drugs—quite which drugs Lewis was unsure—and come to believe that the Black Power was outside Shelley’s place. To scare them off he set a fire, which got out of hand. He was lucky not to burn the house down.
Eventually, Lewis got Nathan’s release conditions changed and he was allowed to live back with his mother, but new charges started to roll in. A drink-drive and then a serious residential burglary in the Upper Hutt suburb of Wallaceville. The Hutt Valley police always opposed bail for Nathan and it had been a struggle to convince judges to grant it.
Then Lewis managed to get Nathan admitted to the Special Circumstances Court. Based at the Wellington District Court, the SCC was established to deal with select defendants whose offending was related to homelessness, but over time its remit had broadened to include people whose offences are connected to some problem in their life which might be solved through special intervention.
In Nathan’s case, the problem was drugs and alcohol. He had pleaded guilty to his existing burglary charges to get into the court, and now he worried that his new charge for stealing sleepers would result in him being kicked out. “Will I get booted for this?” he’d asked Briar the day before. If he went back to the mainstream courts, he’d almost certainly be looking at a sentence of several years. Essentially, Lewis was in a race to get Nathan to rehab before he got sent to prison.
Lewis had brought Nathan’s SCC file along so he could explain to Judge Booth that Nathan was working to rehabilitate himself and should be bailed so these efforts could continue. While it was Lewis who’d arranged for Nathan to go into the specialist court, the file was handled by the Wellington PDS team so he wasn’t up to date with Nathan’s progress. Looking through the file, he saw a recent letter from the SCC’s alcohol and drug clinician, David Prior, saying it was highly likely Nathan would soon be admitted to the Salvation Army’s Bridge programme, an eight-week residential drug and alcohol rehab in Newtown, Wellington. Lewis told Nathan the good news.
Nathan looked pleased. ‘What, in your opinion, do you think that does for section 12?’ he asked thoughtfully, as though he were picking a colleague’s brain. Section 12 is a provision of the bail law which makes it more difficult for defendants to get bail if their offence is serious and if they have a criminal history. And Nathan’s criminal history was indeed lengthy, including several stints in prison. With all the court he’d done, he saw himself as something of a bush lawyer.
Lewis said Prior’s letter should help. “One of the tricky things is that with the very positive report about the Bridge, the judge might prefer for you to wait in custody.” While keeping Nathan sober wouldn’t be a strictly lawful reason to hold him in jail, the judge might take a pragmatic approach and leave him to dry out in prison before entering rehab.
Nathan crossed his arms. “Dave’s offered me extra help,” he said. “He’s willing to check in on me daily.”
Briefed by Briar and with all the files in front of him, Lewis now had his head around the sleepers incident. Nathan had been arrested on 21 September for excess breath alcohol after being pulled over in the Toyota. The sleepers burglary had taken place a few hours earlier and police didn’t yet have reason to suspect his involvement. It wasn’t until Nathan and Shelley had a dispute two months later, and the police were called to her home, that he was finally arrested and charged. “They turned up because Mum rung them. She was a bit annoyed at me,” Nathan had told Briar, giggling.
Nathan had a tempestuous relationship with his mother, but was also her support person. Shelley had recently had a heart attack and needed his help at home. The day before, she’d waited at court all afternoon to see whether Nathan would get bail.
Looking through the file, Lewis sighed. He asked Nathan why on earth he’d given an interview to the police without asking for his lawyer.
Nathan looked pained. “I had this senior sergeant who came to the holding cell and he said, Look, Nate . . . ” The officer had suggested that if Nathan gave a satisfactory statement, they might find a way for him to go home that night, rather than being held in custody until he could go before a judge.
Lewis shook his head. Such offers were not to be trusted. “You can’t rely too much on what police tell you in that kind of situation, Nate.”
“Who’s the judge today? Gardiner has never given me bail.” Henry Gardiner, the valley’s resident judge, was widely perceived to be strict on bail decisions.
Lewis said it was Judge Booth that day. “He’s not like Gardiner, who’s like, I’ll give you bail, if you plead guilty.”
Lewis hadn’t meant it literally, but Nathan understood and he nodded. “And can we please not say arson in court? Or fire. Just call it history.”
Lewis made no reply as he gathered his papers. He didn’t like Nathan dictating submissions, as though Lewis had never made a bail application before. “Good luck, Nate. I hope you get bail.”
“Me too, bro.”
Taken with kind permission from the extraordinary new book of immersive journalism The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City by Asher Emanuel (Bridget Williams Books, $39.99), available in bookstores nationwide. It follows three men through courtrooms, prison, hospital, rehab, boarding houses and welfare offices over the course of nearly two years. All names have been changed, including Nathan Morley and his legal aid lawyer, Lewis Skerrett.
ReadingRoom is devoting the remainder of the week to coverage of The Valley. Tomorrow: a long interview with the author by Steve Braunias. Thursday: a long review by writer and criminal lawyer Fergus Porteous.
