Three Hāwera police officers found not guilty of the manslaughter of man in custody

June 3, 2021
Court started late today so that Allen Ball’s family could be together on the anniversary of his death.

Three Hāwera police officers charged with the manslaughter of a man who died in their care have been found not guilty this afternoon.

At the High Court in New Plymouth today Sandra Shaw, Corey Waite and Craig Longworth were found not guilty of the manslaughter of Allen Ball.

The officers were accused of being grossly negligent in their duty of care to Ball, who died on the floor of a police cell in the Hāwera police station on June 1, 2019.

Ball was arrested a few hours earlier in a highly-intoxicated state.

Allen Ball died at Hāwera police station on June 1, 2019.

In closing arguments yesterday, the Crown described the attitude of the three officers accused as showing a lack of concern, care and laziness.

“When arrested, he immediately became a vulnerable adult," Crown prosecutor Cherie Clarke said in her closing address to the jury in the trial.

“They all knew he had been an aggressor in a family harm accident, how much he had drunk and was unsteady on his feet and that he had threatened to kill himself.

“This made him a very vulnerable adult."

A toxicology report states Ball died of an alcohol, tramadol and codeine overdose.

Ball told one of the police officer’s he had drunk alcohol but said “No” when asked if he had taken anything else.

“When Ball did not wake and respond to pain techniques, the reasonable police officer would have known this was a medical emergency," Clarke said.

Instead, after Ball was dragged into a police cell, the most senior of the accused officers was heard saying “Good luck, you’ve done the hard work” to the other officers, Clarke told the jury yesterday.

Clarke argues the officers’ negligence increased as the night went on with poor checks on the state of Ball made and some checks not logged in the police monitoring computer system.

A police directive that popped up as an alert on the monitoring system to take the detainee to hospital, based on information entered about Ball’s condition, was ignored by two of the officers, Clarke argued.

“The Crown says it is wrong of the defence to suggest they’ve never seen pop-up alerts before because they have.”

Clarke referred to previous evidence from emergency medical specialist Dr Paul Quigley saying that the purpose of this alert is to challenge the confirmation bias of officers.

Clarke said it was “interesting” that neither of the officers mentioned the pop-up alerts in their police interviews.

She said one of the officers initially entered Ball as requiring "constant monitoring" into the monitoring system as he knew Ball was unresponsive but then he changed this assessment.

Susan Hughes QC, defence lawyer for one of the accused officers, opened her closing address yesterday by saying the defendant was an “excellent frontline officer” that was committed to serving their community with honesty and integrity.

Hughes said the officer would have taken Ball to hospital if they thought medical treatment was required.

She said the officers saw Ball as a “sleeping drunk” and weren’t aware of the codeine and tramadol he’d taken.

Hughes said the defendant accepted mistakes had been made but didn’t believe these amounted to a major departure in the police duty of care to people in custody.

She raised that many drunk people sleep deeply and that overweight men can snore.

Hughes questioned how the medical system would cope if an ambulance was called for every sleeping drunk.

She said the officers hadn’t received training in using the computer monitoring system that a police directive for hospitalisation of Ball appeared on that night.

Andrew Laurenson, the defence lawyer for another accused officer, said the officer did not have any responsibility for Ball at any time the night he died.

Laurenson asked the jury if they could be sure that a major departure in the care required in the circumstances had occurred.

He alleged the training the officers had received was, “insufficient for them to be properly able to do what is required.”

He said the officer would have picked up the phone and called an ambulance if he had seen a risk with the condition of Ball.

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