Scott Watson’s appeal of his double-murder conviction is being heard in the Supreme Court.
Watson was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering Ben Smart and Olivia Hope in the Marlborough Sounds and has now been behind bars for 27 years.
The Blenheim friends, aged 21 and 17, were last seen stepping off a water taxi onto a stranger’s yacht in Endeavour Inlet the early hours of 1 January, 1998, after a New Year’s Eve party at Furneaux Lodge.
Their bodies have never been found.
Watson was found guilty of the murders in 1999 after an 11-week jury trial involving about 500 witnesses.
He appealed his convictions after the trial but the application was dismissed. He made another two applications that were unsuccessful before a 2017 bid for a royal pardon was granted, with the case heard by the Court of Appeal in 2024.
Watson’s appeal focuses on one key point – the photo identification process used in the original trial.
Ben Smart and Olivia Hope.
NZ Police
Water taxi driver Guy Wallace identified Watson by photo montage on 20 April 1998 as the mystery man on the yacht Smart and Hope boarded – the last place they were ever seen.
Defence lawyer Nick Chisnell KC said that photo montage evidence was “inadmissible” and “tainted”, but had been a “crucial part” of the Crown’s case.
Chisnell said by the time Wallace was shown the montage, it was about three and a half months after Watson was identified as the suspect, and Hope and Smart disappeared.
“We say that it was profoundly contaminated by outside influences earlier in the investigation,” Chisnell said.
He said police had had already shown Wallace a photo of Watson in early January 1998, but Wallace had told police he didn’t recognise the man.
Chisnell argued police pressured Wallace in the days after this, saying Watson had been identified by others as the “lone” man, the “sleazy” man, the “mystery man”, which suggested he was the key suspect.
“Media saturation” also identified Watson as a suspect and his boat Blade as featuring heavily in the investigation, Chisnell said.
“Then we say the final nail in the unfairness coffin, is the fact that the police created an unfair and improper montage that predisposed Mr Wallace and others to select Mr Watson.”
Chisnell referred to expert evidence raised the Court of Appeal which criticised the photo identification process as a “show up” – by police showing a single photo of Watson, and their naming of him to Wallace, they “directly communicated” to an eye-witness who the central suspect was.
“…In my submission, police primed Mr Wallace to identify Mr Watson, and that tainted the identification procedure in that point onwards.”
Watson also relied on new expert opinion challenging the reliability of the forensic evidence at trial about the two hairs found on a tiger-patterned blanket aboard his boat.
The court’s decision, released last September, found there was no miscarriage of justice in relation to the hair evidence or the identification of Watson by Wallace.
Watson then sought leave to appeal that decision.
The Supreme Court granted the appeal in part, approving only the question of whether the Court of Appeal had been correct to conclude no miscarriage of justice arose from the decision of the trial judge to admit visual identification evidence of Wallace.