Judith Ablett Kerr - fervent defender of justice for all

BY JOHN HARTEVELT

Judith Ablett Kerr, QC, has a bee in her bonnet again. She is fizzing.

"Who was that person?" she snaps.

"Sorry, excuse me; who was that person that just came out of the jury room?"

There was a new face on the press bench that day. The journalists sit next to the door of the jury room, and Ablett Kerr thought the newcomer had emerged from the jury room.

Ablett Kerr has an eye for detail and a passion for justice.

"Let us be bold and confront the challenge and let us do it now, for unless we do we will all fail to discharge our duty to the criminal justice system," she said in her closing at the Clayton Weatherston murder trial in the High Court in Christchurch last month.

Emotion was the enemy of good justice, she told the jury.

"Discard emotion and apply the law of the land," she said. "The rule of law must prevail."

Ablett Kerr's defence of Weatherston attracted hatred and admiration in almost equal measure.

Professor Mark Henaghan, dean of the University of Otago School of Law, says he has come across many people who found Ablett Kerr's efforts unconscionable, "even disgusting".

"But every one of them, to a person, said to me, `I'd have her as my lawyer'."

Ablett Kerr was born and raised in Wales. When she was eight, her mother, Bessie, died of cancer.

Her father, Henry, raised Judith and brother Michael while he pursued various careers, including as a lay Baptist preacher and a Conservative politician.

At 15, Ablett Kerr was the branch chairwoman of the Welsh Young Conservatives and a national debating champion.

She studied law at the University of London and was admitted to the Bar in Cardiff in 1970, at the age of 22.

Ablett Kerr arrived in Dunedin in 1981 after the breakdown of her second marriage and married Lewis Kerr in 1987.

She has two sons Rupert, from her first marriage to a London judge, and Edward, from her second marriage to an insurance broker.

Rupert is now a solicitor in Wellington for Child, Youth and Family, while Edward has a role in the office of Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully.

Ablett Kerr has won a series of high-profile cases.

Between July 1992 and May 1994, she reportedly went 22 months without losing a jury trial.

Her successful defence, with Greg King, of Vicky Calder in Christchurch's "poisoned professor" case in the mid-1990s, is widely considered to be the case that launched her into the top ranks.

Before the first of Calder's two trials, Ablett Kerr was appointed a Queen's Counsel in April 1995 the first female criminal defence lawyer in New Zealand to be made a QC.

King counts Calder's acquittal after her second trial as one of the great successes of both his career and that of Ablett Kerr.

The burly and abrasive King says Ablett Kerr is one of his closest friends. She is the godmother of his eldest daughter and became a mentor to him when she took him on fresh out of Otago University in 1993.

He has assisted in her battle to clear Peter Ellis's name after the Christchurch Civic Childcare Centre case, and the two are in regular contact about cases.

When they combined for the Weatherston case, it was plain they were comfortable as a team. King often had papers at the ready and quietly chipped in thoughts that Ablett Kerr readily took up.

As one of three QCs in Dunedin and the only one dedicated to criminal law, Ablett Kerr is a major figure in southern law.

"You have to deal with her formally, and we don't have any qualms with that," Detective Sergeant Kallum Croudis, of Dunedin, says.

"That's the way that business should be conducted. She is a very careful and methodical operator."

Croudis headed the police investigation into the Weatherston case and was second-in-charge in the re-investigation of the David Bain case.

He said Ablett Kerr had an involvement with the Bain case, but he would not detail it, except to say she had " acted for other people involved in Bain matters". On April 16, 1997, Ablett Kerr helped the Bain family prepare a statement expressing confidence in the police prosecution of Bain in response to Bain supporter Joe Karam's first book.

In May 2007, Ablett Kerr acted for a former Dunedin police detective accused of sexual misbehaviour.

Weatherston was initially represented by Len Andersen, but when Andersen entered the courtroom on February 21 last year he found Ablett Kerr sitting at the defence table. Confusion ensued.

Sources say there was some disquiet in legal circles over Ablett Kerr taking the case.

Weatherston's parents will no longer speak to the media on the record, but it is understood Ablett Kerr was recruited because of her formidable reputation.

"The first lawyer that Clayton Weatherston tried to contact after he had been arrested was Judith Ablett Kerr. She was the lawyer that he had wanted from day one," King says.

The president of the Otago branch of the New Zealand Law Society, Brian Kilkelly, who has known Ablett Kerr since she arrived in Dunedin, says she is an obvious choice for southerners in legal trouble.

"People go to her. If you ask a lot of people who should you be looking at to represent you, I think she would be one of two or three people that you would go to," he says.

When All Blacks halfback Jimmy Cowan was charged with being drunk and disorderly in May and June last year, it was Ablett Kerr who defended him.

Cowan turned to alcohol while dealing with issues in his life that would have distressed any ordinary person, she told the court.

Ablett Kerr has also acted for Margaret June Gordon, Gaye Oakes and Christine King all alleged victims of battering by the men they killed or had arranged to be killed.

She has written and spoken widely on the issue of battered women and the partial defence of provocation.

She argued in the Weatherston case that he had been ill-equipped to deal with the trauma of a tumultuous relationship because of his "unique personality makeup".

This year, Ablett Kerr will again be in the High Court in Christchurch, this time arguing in the retrial of Eric Neil Smail, who, in September 2006, was given a life sentence, with a non-parole period of 13 years, for murdering tetraplegic Keith McCormick.

King says Ablett Kerr never goes looking for particular cases.

"It's always essential, I think, in this business that you run a case and you do not run a cause," he says.

"We don't go looking for particular types of cases; one develops an expertise in certain types of cases."

Kilkelly says Ablett Kerr will not turn her back on a challenge.

"If a criminal barrister says they don't relish the challenge and theatrics of a courtroom, I suggest they're probably not telling the truth," he says.

This is precisely the point that her critics have missed in the Weatherston case, he says.

Commentators say it seems clear that she was acting on orders from Weatherston, occasionally perhaps often against her better judgment and advice. Her fidelity to the profession and to her client was so thorough that she became indistinguishable to observers from Weatherston himself.

The vitriol against Weatherston raged in cyberspace, and Ablett Kerr copped her share.

During the course of the trial she confided to The Press that she had had acid thrown over her car.

There was also an email from Christchurch priest Father Tim Hurd in the early stages of the trial expressing disgust at the defence.

King says he had never experienced abuse of the scale Ablett-Kerr suffered.

"I was attacked in a courtroom a few years ago those sorts of things are not unprecedented but the scale of the vitriol directed at Judith has been unprecedented," he says.

"What we think is just and proper depends very much on where we're sitting in the courtroom.

"If you're sitting in the dock, or you're sitting in the public gallery with your son sitting in the dock, what you think is just is very, very different to what you think if you're sitting in the public gallery because your child has been murdered."

Ablett Kerr, who took a holiday at the end of the Weatherston case, has said she will not talk to the media until after Weatherston is sentenced.

King says: "Her wisdom, her knowledge and friendship are incredibly valuable to me. And those that know her, know that that is the real Judith Ablett Kerr. What they see on television is a surgeon going about her clinical job."

- © Fairfax NZ News