Watson's lawyers tell Supreme Court police 'primed' key witness before montage identification
Scott Watson's lawyers told the Supreme Court on Tuesday that police "primed" the witness at the centre of his double-murder conviction. They said police showed water taxi driver Guy Wallace a single photograph of Watson, then named Watson to him as the suspect, before Wallace picked him out of a photo montage.
The two-day hearing in Scott Watson v The King, SC 109/2025, opened in Wellington before Chief Justice Winkelmann and Justices Ellen France, Williams, Kós and Cooke. The Courts of New Zealand website livestreamed it from 10am. Members of the Hope, Smart and Watson families attended, the NZ Herald reported.
The court is not deciding whether Watson is guilty. It is deciding whether his trial was fair. Leave was granted on a single question, RNZ reported: was the Court of Appeal right that no miscarriage of justice came from the trial judge's decision to admit Wallace's visual identification evidence? The court refused to hear the other proposed grounds, the Herald reported, including Watson's challenge to the forensic evidence about two hairs found on a tiger-patterned blanket on his boat.
Ben Smart and Olivia Hope disappeared in the Marlborough Sounds over New Year 1998. The Herald described Wallace as the only person who identified Watson as the man who got off the water taxi with them. "He was the way the Crown linked Ben and Olivia to Blade, to who they say was the mystery man taking them away to kill them," Watson's lead counsel, Nick Chisnall KC, told the court, Law News reported. Blade was Watson's sloop.
Chisnall said police showed Wallace a single photograph of Watson on or around 8 January 1998, just over a week after the disappearances. Wallace did not recognise him.
Police then pressured Wallace, Chisnall said, telling him others had identified Watson as the lone man at the bar and naming him. "This telegraphed to Wallace that he was the key suspect," he said, the Herald reported.
In an interview on 11 January, Wallace said he did recognise Watson, Law News reported. The published reports of the hearing do not say whether police named Watson in that same interview or earlier.
Chisnall referred to expert evidence put before the Court of Appeal, RNZ reported. That evidence called the process a "show-up", where a witness is shown one suspect instead of a line-up, and said that by showing one photo and naming the man, police "directly communicated" the central suspect's identity to an eyewitness.
On 20 April 1998, three and a half months after Watson was identified as a suspect, Wallace was shown the eight-person montage known as Montage B, Chisnall said, RNZ and the Herald reported. Wallace had told police the man he saw had hooded eyes, Law News reported, and Chisnall said this led police to use a picture of Watson with his eyes half closed. An image of Montage B shown in court had Watson as the only person with his eyes closed, the Herald reported. Chisnall called the montage "the final nail in the unfairness coffin".
Chisnall pointed as well to the coverage of the case, which he said reached a point where the Solicitor-General directed media not to publish further details before the deposition hearing, the Herald reported.
The defence challenged Montage B before trial and lost. But the Herald reported Chisnall telling the court that the judge who dismissed the challenge was never told Wallace had already been shown a single photograph of Watson, or that police had told Wallace that Watson was a suspect.
RNZ reported Chisnall calling the montage evidence "inadmissible" and "tainted", yet a "crucial part" of the Crown's case. "We say that Mr Wallace's identification was and is inadmissible, and that its unfair prejudice outweighed its probative value," he said, Law News reported.
Chisnall took issue, too, with the Court of Appeal's view that the jury could weigh the identification for itself. "It is well known that juries put inordinate weight on identification evidence," he said. That approach "directly clashes with modern scientific knowledge", he told the court.
Watson, who has been in prison for 27 years, was sentenced to life with a minimum of 17 years and has always maintained his innocence, RNZ and the Herald reported. His lawyers told the court that if the appeal succeeds they do not want a retrial, citing the time that has passed and the media's part in the case. "This case is singular in the way the media and the nation have been captured by it," Kerry Cook KC said.
In the Herald's timeline of the case, Watson applied for the royal prerogative of mercy in 2017, and in 2020 the then Governor-General, Dame Patsy Reddy, referred his convictions to the Court of Appeal. In September 2025 that court dismissed the appeal in a 291-page judgment. It found no miscarriage of justice and said the Crown had presented "a compelling circumstantial case" that Watson was the lone man. The Supreme Court granted leave in March 2026.
At the Court of Appeal hearing in June 2024, the Herald reported, the Crown argued its case was cumulative and circumstantial and did not depend on any single witness or on the hair evidence alone. Crown counsel M F Laracy, S C Baker and T R Simpson reply on Wednesday.