The S-Files

Judicial History Re-Made

Contra Celsum feels compelled to nominate Winston Peters for a third S-Award

Winston Peters is leader of the political party, New Zealand First and until recently has served as New Zealand's Foreign Minister. He and his political party are now the subject of four separate investigations over a host of alleged financial and electoral law improprieties. Some of the allegations, if proven, carry considerable prison sentences.

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Contra Celsum wishes to acknowledge that Winston Peters has single handedly changed the course of trial law, court room manoeuvres, and the juridical tactics of the criminal bar.

He has recently appeared before Parliament's Privileges Committee to defend himself on charges of misleading the House.

His defence was so novel and startling that it will have criminal lawyers and judges and leading scholars of jurisprudence having to re-cast over one hundred and fifty years of law in this country, not to mention centuries of anglo-saxon trial law. The sheer breathtaking brilliance of Mr Peters's arguments left the Privileges Committee stunned.

Faced with strongly incriminating evidence that, contrary to his strenuous denials, Peters had not only known of a secret donation of $100,000 from ex-pat billionaire, Owen Glenn, but that he actually solicited it, Mr Peters sought to refute and contradict the documentary and sworn witness statements produced by Mr Glenn this week before the Privileges Committee.

Mr Peters did not produce any documentary evidence on his own account. He did not need to. His sheer logical and legal brilliance left the Privileges Committee both dazzled and awestruck. Mr Peters acknowledged that the Glenn documentary evidence was clear and particular. However, this only went to prove, he argued, that it was manufactured evidence and not genuine. It was, to use his term, “coached evidence”. The more clear the evidence, the less reliable it becomes.

Thus we have the Peters gambit that will re-write judicial history. Clear evidence is less reliable.

So scintillating and revolutionary is the Peters gambit that the news media have just announced that convicted criminals throughout the prison system are preparing to lodge appeals against their convictions. The fact that they were convicted in the first place has now become prima facie evidence of an unsafe or false conviction. Since their respective juries and judges found the prosecutors' evidence clear and compelling, by the logic of the Peters gambit, this proves positively that the evidence used to convict them was manufactured and not compelling at all—or even untrue.

It is not often in the history of human affairs that a luminary appears amongst us, who with logic at the same time both subtle and profound, is able to demolish a legal tradition that has stood for over a thousand years, and challenge the very foundations of justice itself. And all done with the studied casualness that bespeaks true and prodigious greatness.

Most human beings live within history. Some change history. But sometimes one will come forth who lives above history and changes the very meaning of civilisation itself. Our generation has just seen such a One.

Winston Peters, suspended NZ Foreign Minister, Leader of the NZ First Political Party: S-Award, Class II, for actions that have been unbelievably Stupid, Short Sighted and Stupefied