State needs to protect defendant’s right to a fair trial

In dealing with defendants like Ivan Curry, the State needs to take special care to ensure their rights to a fair trial are protected. Because they were not, Curry, who was deaf after suffering meningitis as an infant, spent two years in jail before being brought to trial on a murder charge a jury took just two hours to throw out.

His sad and disquieting experience was the subject of a thought-provoking docu-drama, The Remand of Ivan Curry, on Television One last night.

Curry was alleged to have killed his 15-month-old nephew by punching the child as he lay sleeping in Curry’s Waitotara home on October 5, 1988.

He made two statements to the police subsequently — one to a constable alone, with brief visits by a senior officer while the interview was taking place, and another witnessed by a teacher for the deaf. In each, Curry was supposed to have confessed to striking the child three times in the chest.

It was clear from the comments of people in Waitotara who knew him well that there was widespread scepticism in the community when he was charged. He was known by the cliched but apparently apt description as a gentle giant, a simple person with no history of violence.

The policeman who recorded his first statement admitted that he had no experience of dealing with the deaf and that Curry’s replies on which the confession was based were interpretations, as accurate as he could make them, of what was being said by Curry with a combination of sign language and disjointed speech.

Director Keith Hunter used actors to re-enact the court scenes based on the transcripts of evidence in the pre-trial and High Court hearings. The circumstances in which Curry’s first statement was made were clearly unsatisfactory.

The police move to provide an interpreter for the second statement appeared to remedy the most apparent defect in the initial procedure. But as the teacher for the deaf who filled this role pointed out, he was given no real briefing on the procedure for taking a statement to be used subsequently in evidence. If he had, he would not have written a sentence which Curry did not understand but copied because he was instructed to, that the statement was a true and correct record.

As the 90-minute-long production ranged over other aspects of the case, it became increasingly apparent that the police had adopted a mindset almost from the first which dictated that Ivan Curry had murdered the child and shut out any other possibilities.

Just how profoundly that contributed to his plight was highlighted with shattering clarity in one dramatic moment in the High Court trial when his wife Whetu was giving evidence. She admitted administering CPR to the baby on returning to their house after a walk. The child had been in bed and had appeared not to be breathing.

Asked to demonstrate she pressed down vigorously on a cushion in the courtroom, clearly vigorously enough in the minds of most people there, including the jury, to have caused the injuries Ivan Curry was supposed to have inflicted. Then perhaps the most startling revelation of all — the police had been told of this but had rejected it as not relevant.

Like everyone else, the police are prone to error. In this instance their mistakes cost a man two years of his life. They will have taken lessons, one hopes, from what happened. The Remand of Ivan Curry should help ensure that a deaf person, whatever the other limitations his disability may impose, has the same access to justice as everyone else.

Photo caption: Frank Whitten as defence lawyer.