Alan Hall spent 19 years in jail for a 1986 murder he did not commit. His brother Geoff speaks out about the emotional toll, and the battle that lies ahead
The day Alan Hall was convicted of murdering a man in an Auckland home, Hall’s family got into their car and drove away from the court in complete silence.
It was this feeling – that the police had got it so wrong – that compelled Hall’s family to fight the conviction. It was a battle they committed to for 36 years, right up until last week when New Zealand’s highest court – the supreme court –because there had been a “substantial miscarriage of justice”.
At one point, as people were filing out of the court, Geoff looked for his brother, but he had vanished from the room. “Alan was gone. He got his freedom and off he goes,” he laughs. That evening, on the flight home from Wellington to Auckland, Alan celebrated with a glass of wine – the second glass in 12 years, on his second flight in 40 years.
“If the exoneration came within the first 10 years of Alan’s conviction, we would have absolutely been jumping around,” Geoff says. However, after multiple setbacks, “the mindset changes and you learn to accept it, and you become desensitised to the horror of what had happened to him”. On the night of the murder, and in subsequent interviews, a key witness told police the man he saw running from the property was “definitely dark-skinned, he was not white”. He said the man was Māori, and even when Hall, who is pākehā – or European descent – became the subject of police’s attention, the witness maintained his observation.
into what part the crown played in what is now considered one of the New Zealand’s most significant miscarriages of justice – making it the first time in the country’s history that crown law has turned investigators on itself. Meanwhile, Alan Hall is now preparing to file for compensation – if successful, the sum could exceed that of other cases “by a very wide margin” Hall’s lawyer Nick Chisnall said, following the court’s decision.
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