Heroic lawyer helps Berrymans win compensation

OPINION: The Berryman bridge saga has finally come to an end for the elderly Whanganui couple after 15 years of battling through the courts for justice.

It is a scandal that it has taken so long for this now frail pair to win what is a miserly compensation payment for the torture they have been put through. That they have hung on this long is due to the terrier-like tenacity they and their lawyer, Rob Moodie, have displayed.

Implicit in the $150,000 payment from the Government is an admission to Keith and Margaret Berryman that they have been wronged. But by who? That is a question no-one in authority appears prepared to answer.

I support Dr Moodie's call for a commission of inquiry. Its head must come from outside New Zealand. We are too small a country, where the leaders of law and the judiciary are too closely connected through school, university, sport, business, church and lodge. That cannot be helped, but it can lead to questions of impropriety.

An inquiry has much to investigate. Beekeeper Ken Richards died in 1994 when his truck fell through a bridge leading to the Berrymans' remote King Country farm. Almost 16 years later, no-one will accept any blame.

The inquiry could start with the building of the bridge, on district council land, to the farm. It could look at the timber used - second- hand oregon with a short life - and its suitability for such a structure, and its design and construction by the army.

It could also determine whether the Berrymans discharged their responsibility for maintenance of the bridge during its short eight- year life and what contribution, if any, that had to its collapse and the death of Mr Richards.

But more importantly, an inquiry could consider allegations of a cover- up to conceal the army's full role. In court, Dr Moodie talked of a conspiracy and he named names.

This stems from the 1997 inquest. The coroner was told by the army's counsel "there was nothing in the entire construction of the bridge that contributed to the accident". But four years later an army engineer's report - available at the time of the inquest - was unearthed that said faulty design and construction contributed to the collapse.

A couple of High Court judgments have dealt with the issue, but not satisfactorily.

One judge quashed the inquest's finding that the Berrymans should take all the blame for the bridge's collapse, but did not order another inquest. Another agreed with Dr Moodie that the army was wrong to deny at the inquest that it knew nothing, but also said the Berrymans must share some of the blame for not maintaining the bridge.

What has been frustrating for Dr Moodie and the Berrymans is that the army, which has continually denied any wrongdoing and has fought hard through the courts, has emerged from the saga without penalty.

At the same time, the couple say they have been forced to sell their farm to pay their legal debts, which go back to a failed 1996 Occupational Safety and Health charge against them. When they ran out of money, Dr Moodie took on their case free of charge.

In my view, Dr Moodie is one of this nation's great men. At the risk of demeaning him with comic book jargon, he is my ideal of a fearless crusader against injustice. I have watched from the sidelines as a reporter of the bridge saga at various stages and as a reporter of his other high-profile case, the fraud allegations against former police superintendent Alec Waugh.

His work on these cases was characterised by bloody-minded doggedness. Once convinced that a wrong had been done, he was unflinching in his pursuit of a fair hearing. He was one man against the forces of government-backed institutions and the backside- covering mateship that is endemic in them.

Not for him the weasel words of cloistered courtroom etiquette. When frustrations with the glacial pace of legal proceedings boiled over, he cleverly turned to parody. He changed his name to Miss Alice and dressed up as Alice in Wonderland in a brilliant ploy to draw attention to what he saw as a farce.

And all this came at a cost. Financially, his pursuit of the Berryman case has been close to ruinous, although that is not new to him. How his health has managed to stand up to the stress I cannot say. His professional reputation suffered, with mutterings about bringing the courts into disrepute, but among people who have ever felt the helplessness of battling against institutional bureaucracy, he is a hero.

Dr Moodie is preparing a formal complaint to Police Commissioner Howard Broad, pushing for charges of criminal negligence to be laid against senior figures in the Defence Ministry.

The terrier is still in the fight.

- © Fairfax NZ News