Many Deaths of Mary Dobie: Murder, Politics and Revenge in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand, The by Hastings David

Author:Hastings, David [Hastings, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Crime
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2015-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

10.

MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL

The accused killer found unexpected support in the strange city where he had come to meet his fate. It first appeared among the many Māori people who were on the waterfront to greet him, all in silence except for the old woman who shouted words of defiance and encouragement as Tuhi passed by. It continued during his trial when they turned out in numbers every day. And it came in a pragmatic form too when the Māori people who lived at Te Aro organised a lawyer to defend him.1 Without their intervention it is doubtful that he would have done it himself given his state of mind since the dramatic late-night confession at the inquest.

The man they briefed had an impressive record, on paper at least. Charles Forwood had been in the legal profession for 30 years and his CV included a brief stint as acting chief justice of Fiji as well as showing he was once considered a front-runner for the job of second magistrate in Wellington.2 But this was not as impressive as it might seem. Forwood did not get the job as magistrate and he acted only briefly as chief justice in a small colony so the title was not nearly as exalted as it sounded. His record as a lawyer in Wellington for the two years before Tuhi’s trial did not suggest any special ability to defend a man on a capital charge. Most of his work was dealing with bankruptcy or petty crime and licensing cases in the Magistrate’s Court. He came perilously close to bankruptcy himself when, just four months before the murder trial, he was forced to declare that he could not pay his debts and his creditors appointed trustees to navigate him through his difficult patch.3

Before Forwood could devote his attention to Tuhi’s case he had another job to finish. While the Hinemoa was on its way north to collect his next client, Forwood was appearing in the Magistrate’s Court to apply for a liquor licence for a notorious sly-grog shop which was evidently trying to go straight after too many inconvenient brushes with the law. The result of that case did not bode well; had Tuhi or the people of Te Aro cared to notice, the application was rejected. Ill-equipped as he was, Forwood faced a task which would have been of daunting difficulty even for a defence lawyer experienced in the dark arts of defending a murder charge. His problems could be neatly categorised as lack of time, lack of resources and a client who was far too talkative for his own good.

The problem of time was simply stated. Forwood took up his brief on Monday 6 December and the Supreme Court session at which Tuhi was to be tried began on the following Thursday. Forwood’s first move was to persuade the reluctant court to delay the start of the trial until after the weekend.4 It was a small victory, gaining him at most three days, but it counted as something special in a case where wins for the defence were few.

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