Gunn Free with Assault Conviction Dropped
Auckland High Court Judge Finds Former TVNZ News Anchor was Assertive
In his manual for unbraiding the disingenuous, Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, Professor T. Edward Damer stated a red herring logical fallacy occurs when an arguer is, “[a]ttempting to hide the weakness of a position by drawing attention away from the real issue to a side issue.”
Verdict of Red Herring Show Trial Overturned By Lawful Logic
FORMER TVNZ ONE NETWORK NEWS anchor Liz Gunn received news earlier today that an assault conviction against her was ‘set aside’ by the High Court.
The February 13th decision by Judge J Peters ‘stops’ a miscarriage of justice arrived at last May when a District Court Judge, Janey Forrest got ‘lost’ in the illogical legal woods of a cheap Court Room Soap drama, that ended with finding Gunn guilty of assault. Gunn was on trial for the charge ‘assaulting’ an Airport security worker.
As the Snoopman reported at the time, Gunn (65), had been brutally assaulted by a senior constable stationed at Auckland Airport, when she was arrested in spectacular fashion along with her co-accused camerman, Jonathan Clark, on 25 February 2023.
The dispute arose over the nature of the filming at the Airport. Kolodesnaya and other Airport staff, and the two Constables, had made the error of assuming a big camera equated with commercial filming, which required a permit, unless the enterprise is an accredited media organization. Neither the Police, nor the Airport SkyGate Security, established what Gunn’s media entity was called, nor that it was a non-profit donation funded enterprise. With these skipped steps, the scene escalated into cop-thuggery.
Gunn and Clark intended to film the arrival of the Patelesio family, who were emigrating to New Zealand. They had been persecuted in Tokelau and placed under house arrest for 13 months, amid a ‘vaccination’ drive on the watch of Jacinda Ardern’s father, David Ross Ardern, who was Administrator (2018-2022), for 10 of those months.
Mr Ardern had been involved in the vaccination project from the start.
Gunn had touched the arm of an Airport Security Officer to get her attention during a discussion in which the purpose of their filming was challenged by the Airport staffer.
Judge J Peters threw out the Police case saying Liz Gunn’s light touch of the Airport Security officer was reasonable in the circumstances, and that Gunn was being assertive, not confrontational. The Judge added that most people wouldn’t consider such a light fleeting touch to get another person’s attention as an assault.
In an upbeat podcast on X-Twitter, Gunn read out some of the most salient points in the decision, about a strange yet costly trial that was, in essence, a cheap drama of egos belonging to muppets who didn’t do their jobs properly in a jurisdiction that would’ve failed its Warrant of Fitness if it were a car needing a roadworthiness check.
In the critical part of the decision, the Judge referred to a case of Collins v Wilcock, in which a police officer had detained a woman she wished to question, and she had done so by taking hold of the woman’s arm. It was common ground that, at the time she did so, the police officer did not have a right to arrest the woman, who retaliated, and was charged with assault. The police officer was found to have committed assault.
Judge Peters found that Gunn’s touch was fleeting to gain the Airport Secuirty Offficer’s attention and the degree of contact or force was no greater than was reasonably necessary for the purpose. And therefore, Gunn’s action was not unlawful.
The Auckland High Court Judge also found Gunn to be “polite, albeit assertive and wishing to communicate her view” to the Airport SkyGate Officer, Anna Kolodesnaya.
In the District Court, Judge Forrest had taken the view that Gunn made the encounter “confrontational and hostile” and that she had been “rude and inappropriate”.
It was therefore, ironic that the Crown Prosecution side had cited the case of Collins v Wilcock, to attempt to defend their framing of Gunn for assault. As I showed last June, a red herring show trial occurred. Gunn and Clark were assaulted by Police. Once they were on the arrivals floor, they were both told seperately, they were under arrest.
Gunn’s and Clark’s spectacular arrests within 18 seconds of the Police greeting them, meant this constabulary duo skipped the crucial step of due diligence to establish their viewpoint. Kolodeznaya’s accusation that she was assaulted appeared to be intended to gain a swift response. Yet, she admitted Gunn touched her to get her attention.
An attention-getting touch was turned into an attention-deflecting assault to distract from the Police brutality. In effect, skipped procedures, breached processes, and ignored policies were swept under the arrivals rug and then the errors were compounded by twinking-out the assaults to hide a ‘mountain’ of evidence.
The calculus underpinning this ‘Red Herring Gunn Trial’ was that the Police assaults on Gunn and Clark could only be dealt with in a separate trial. Gunn’s public profile became a problem that needed a devious solution. Ergo, the trial was equal parts a face-saving exercise for the Airport and Police, a scapegoating exercise to resolve a potential crisis and a power accumulation exercise to ‘lobby’ for a law change.
It appears that a ‘meeting of minds’ occurred between the Police, the Airport, the Crown Law Office to frame Gunn to save face also for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
The independent media duo had been waiting to film the arrival of a Tokelauan family, who had come to live in New Zealand following a cruel house arrest for refusing to be ‘vaccinated’ on the watch of Tokelau’s highest official, Ross Ardern, the father of Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister at the time.
Judge Forrest — formerly of Wellington was appointed to the bench two years prior. This appointment by the Attorney General, David Parker, occurred two weeks before Ross Ardern was replaced with a new Tokelau Administrator. Forrest appears to have read the ‘ley of the land’, and opted for a conviction to justify using her judgment to lobby a law change that could be used a tool to crack-down on dissident journalism.
Ironically, the Patelesio family had been helped by a volunteer team of lawyers, whose efforts were publicized by Gunn’s voluntary, donation-funded FreeNZ Media. Ross Ardern was also reportedly involved in meetings with the Patelesio family. Instead of sticking up for their human rights as Tokelau’s top official, he had evidently used colourful language to tell them they were putting others at risk, said lawyer Darin Cassidy in a podcast with FreeNZ Media in September of 2022.
Ergo, the focus of the case was the assault charge against a former TVNZ news anchor, Liz Gunn, to deflect attention away from the police assaults.
Yet, this bogus focus was actually a red herring charge — as any private investigator who has read T. Edward Damer’s classic book, Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, would readily detect. As Professor Damer defined it, a red herring logical fallacy occurs when an arguer is, “[a]ttempting to hide the weakness of a position by drawing attention away from the real issue to a side issue.”
Professor Damer — whose book resulted from over a quarter of century workshops, debates, and lectures — explained that a red herring fallacy is used in an argument to deflect attention from the real point of the conflict to a different, perhaps, related point. Damer added, the red herring fallacy is deployed as a tactic to construct the appearance that the related issue is relevant to the argument at hand, as a means to avoid confronting the main point of criticism. My analysis of the logical fallacies proves a red herring trial occurred, as presented in the three-part SkyGate series.
Gunn told the court that the Senior Constable fractured her wrist, and tore ligaments in her shoulder and arm. Mr Clark suffered bruises and scrapes to his arms and legs.
A common assault in the Summary Offences Act carries a maximum term of imprisonment of six months or a fine of up to $4000. The state threatened her liberty.
As she read Judge Peters view, Gunn’s newsreading composure was overtaken by the emotion. “I am satistfied the Judge erred to such an extent,” Gunn read and took off her glasses, “that a miscarriage of justice has occurred.” She spoke of the two years.
Gunn said, for 18 months the Police refused to cooperate with the court to release the surveillance camera footage. In the end, tapes from only two cameras were released.
As Julian Assange observed in 2015, the drawn-out process is the punishment.
With this weight of the state off her mind, Gunn thanked her family, friends and “all those caring Kiwis who supported me through this ordeal.” She recalled the assault.
Gunn also thanked Matthew Hague at Frontline Law who took on the case, the trial, and lodged two appeals, for his tremendous effort in the win. She is free and at-large.
Steve Snoopman worked at indigenous broadcaster, Māori Television, for 14 years as an editor of news and current affairs. He forged his superpower to ‘Thunk Evil Without Being Evil’ while writing a thesis on the Global Financial Crisis. Upon quipping that Batman had failed to bust any Gotham banker balls — since his ass is owned by DC Comics — he consequently realised New Zealand needed a Snoopman.
Editor’s Note: If we have made any errors, please contact Steve ‘Snoopman’ Edwards with your counter-evidence. e: steveedwards108[at]protonmail.com
Steve Snoopman also posts on Snoopman News [at] https://snoopman.net.nz/
Glad to see at least some judges are ruling on law and not letting ideology or politics colour their ruling. May more follow suit.
Agree - also that the "drawn out process is the punishment" .