Free Who Killed Scott Guy? by Mike White Page A

stabbed his two stepdaughters; and Sophie Elliot’s killer Clayton Weatherston all had King in their corner.
    It was all a far cry from King’s humble beginnings, born into a state house family in Whanganui in 1969 to Jeff, a half-Maori shearer and freezing worker, and Jennifer, his redheaded schoolyard sweetheart. When Greg was six, the family moved to Turangi, where Jeff worked as a prison warden, locking up the likes of Arthur Allan Thomas.
    His mum remembers Greg as always being argumentative, and his Tongariro High School reports noted he ‘talks too much’. But despite also being labelled ‘a lazy worker’ and being put in the bottom science class where he had to grow a plant rather than make a hot air balloon, King eventually became the school’s head boy.
    He was in the first XV and became a keen boxer—not great, but damned determined. His dad recalls one bout where King was punched right out of the ring. While everyone roared with laughter, King climbed back in, lifted his gloves again and beat his opponent. ‘We’d finish the fight and I’d be covered in blood and barely able to walk, and the other guy would look like he’d just come out of a shower—but I’d win,’ said King. ‘I used to get a hiding on a regular basis, but that hardened me up for law. It taught me not to back down when you need to dig your toes in.’ Jeff’s battle with alcoholism, while eventually successful, also toughened King, giving him a lot of life experience at an early age, his mum said.
    In 1988 King spent ten months representing New Zealand at the World Expo in Brisbane. The ‘token country boy’ impressed everyone he came into contact with, from Sir Edmund Hillary to Mick Jagger, and a testimonial by New Zealand’s deputy commissioner-general at the Expo, Don Hutchings, proved prophetic: ‘Greg will go on to achieve much in his life and New Zealand will come to know his name very well.’
    King had his heart set on becoming a pilot and already had a freezing works job lined up to pay for flying lessons. But New Zealand’s Expo commissioner, Ian Fraser, suggested he should get a degree first. So despite having never met a lawyer, he enrolled in law at Otago University and was admitted to the bar in 1993.
    King’s rapid rise since then had seen him defend priests on sex charges; a father accused of killing his seriously ill 5-month-old daughter; gang members involved in the country’s largest armed robbery; a 90-year-old charged with murdering his wife in a suicide pact on their 60th wedding anniversary; and the man who attacked the ‘Virgin in a Condom’ exhibit at Te Papa.
    It was easy to characterise him as a siren chaser who sought the most high-profile cases, but that view ignored the countless clients he represented for whom he received no headlines, little recompense and often much opprobrium. In King’s book, everyone, no matter how devastating the evidence against them, deserved the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial with the best counsel. Often attacked for arguing on behalf of shitbags and scoundrels, King was adamant that nobody should be judged other than in a court.
    This view was honed early in his career, in 1995, when he took on the case of a man accused of viciously raping a 12-year-old girl. The evidence against him seemed overwhelming and even King believed he’d done it. But before they got to trial, someone else confessed to the crime, with DNA tests later clearing King’s client. It was a brutal lesson not to presume or prejudge.
    Tales of King’s generosity are legion: the cases done for free or a feed of fish; the client in a big case who wrote to him afterwards asking if he’d left a zero off his bill; the woman who stabbed her son, leaving him paralysed, who King got acquitted on the grounds of insanity, despite her husband wanting her jailed. After the trial King approached the husband to explain what had happened, then gave the man a lift back to work and,