Free Who Killed Scott Guy? by Mike White Page B

as he said goodbye, handed him money for his young son’s Christmas present. In 2004, King spent $50,000 of his own money to take the case of Bruce Howse to the Privy Council—not because he believed Howse was innocent, but because he was convinced he hadn’t received a fair trial and that to overlook the mistakes that had been made threatened the entire New Zealand justice system.
    Friend and fellow lawyer Robert Lithgow said King would go looking for things other lawyers wouldn’t bother with. ‘He’s enthusiastic. He digs and burrows deeply and dives into cases and swims round in them like Scrooge McDuck. He just lives and breathes criminal defences every working minute—and probably when he’s asleep as well. He likes people no matter what they’ve done, enjoys helping them and doesn’t judge them.’
    So despite the inevitable vitriol launched at Ewen Macdonald from the time of his arrest, despite the whispers about what other wickedness he’d done, King never for a moment had second thoughts about defending him.
    He met Macdonald for the first time late that morning at the Palmerston North Police Station. Macdonald told him he didn’t want to apply for bail or name suppression, not wanting any speculation in the community about who had been arrested. Later, King met with Kerry and Marlene Macdonald, who were still in a nightmarish whirl of disbelief and doubt. Marlene remembers him calmly explaining the process, what would happen next and then saying, ‘Your boy hasn’t done this and we’ll get your boy home.’
    ‘And I thought, “How confident is that?”’
    By the time they got to the courthouse at 1.30 pm it seemed most of the country’s media had arrived in Palmerston North, from local reporters to celebrity TV presenters like John Campbell. Even King, not unused to media attention, was taken aback. ‘I had no idea it was of that level of interest.’
    While he had been aware of Scott Guy’s murder and the nine-month investigation, when he saw the wall of cameras and microphones he suddenly began to wonder what he’d got himself into.

CHAPTER 6

Preparing the defence
    In late November 2011, Greg King walked from his office on the third floor of a Lower Hutt building and motioned a visitor to follow him down the corridor. In a room at the end he stopped and stared at a wall, a wall entirely covered with more than 150 lever-arch folders containing police information about their investigation into Scott Guy’s murder. In total there would have been close to 40,000 pages of what is termed disclosure.
    The visitor shook his head and mentioned that King couldn’t possibly be expected to read all that. King looked at him just long enough and with just enough disdain to make it clear he thought the visitor was an idiot. ‘Well, we have to,’ he replied with restraint. ‘There’s no real logical structure to it—that would make life too easy, of course—so it’s just a case of doing it.’
    There were no shortcuts. Every lead the police followed had to be re-examined and assessed. Every witness statement had to be cross-referenced with that of others. Every expert opinion had to be reviewed and tested. ‘Essentially it’s as simple as this,’ King explained. ‘They construct, we deconstruct. They build a case, we try and expose the weaknesses in it. They accentuate the negative and we try and eliminate it and put events in their proper context. So you’ve got to understand their case. And obviously the case they present is only a small fraction of all the evidence that’s been gathered. They’ve made an assessment somewhere along the line of what’s relevant and what’s not and present their case accordingly. So we need to go through the stuff they regard as not relevant and decide whether we think it’s relevant. So there’s a huge amount of sifting that has to take place. You’ve got to be really disciplined to ensure by the time you step in that courtroom that the work has been