Lifestyles of the drugged and listless
The Rangiora murder trial gave an eight-day view into the lifestyles of the idle and drugged.
Idle in the sense of lacking employment, because for some of their time they seemed quite busy.
Energy goes into staying stoned, even for those who class as invalid beneficiaries.
When they are not drugged out, they are out trying to get more.
They mock those who work for a living by referring to an expedition in pursuit of their drug habit as “an earn”.
That means an errand that might involve drug purchases, or the burglaries and thefts – even the robberies – that get the money to make the purchases.
The “earn” that went wrong in September 2013 and led to the stabbing death of low-level Rangiora drug dealer Tony Lochhead was carried out by drunk and drugged Jason Baker.
He was running on what was repeatedly referred to as a cocktail of the stuff – morphine, Rivotril, alcohol. His defence did not say his level of intoxication was a defence to the murder charge, but said it had affected his judgment and his ability to consider the consequences. It said the fatal neck wound was delivered in the course of a fight.
Defence counsel for Baker, Gerald Nation, asked the jury to set aside evidence that co-accused Shaun Innes had known Baker had a knife because he saw it in the car on the journey to Rangiora. He explained: “People involved in drugs often have knives, not because they wish to threaten anyone. It’s just part of the scene.”
Innes’ defence was that he had distanced himself from the scene and run away when it was realised that the Lochhead brothers were home, and that he was well away when the violence occurred at the hands of Baker. The Crown said that didn’t matter. Prosecutor Pip Currie said the two had acted together and it had been Innes’ job to knock on the door and get the victims outside. When the violence occurred, his role was already over.
The defence teams wanted the jury not to ponder why they should care at all about some druggies doing a robbery on a drug dealer, and if they should just get them all locked up anyway. They wanted the jurors to consider the facts and the arguments as seriously as in any other trial.
But in the end, this was a trial where regular folks delivered the community’s judgment on members of the drug netherworld, where the imperatives can be quite different.
Some Crown witnesses gave their evidence after travelling from the prison where at least one had ended up for morphine dealing. The trial was delayed one day for another to get there after her sentencing on cheque fraud charges – the proceeds were used for her drug habit.
These habits are expensive. It looked like they could be costing up to $100 a day for some of those the trial heard about.
Baker and a woman had had a windfall on the day that Tony Lochhead was killed and his brother Peter Lochhead badly stabbed. The woman’s car had been damaged in a windstorm and she had traded it in, in its damaged state, for a replacement car and $400 cash.
By the evening the cash was gone. Spent on drugs.
Defence counsel for 37-year-old Innes, Michael Knowles, referred to his client being part of “a pointless, stupid, dead-end lifestyle”.
In the end, the jury found both men guilty of the murder and wounding charges and they are custody awaiting sentence in November.
The final word doesn’t come from the Rangiora murder trial at all.
It comes from a sentencing some years ago, when a young druggie startled everyone by declaring to the probation officer in his pre-sentence interview that he “could not understand what straight people do with their time”.
The judge at that sentencing found that attitude distinctly unimpressive.
Category: Observations
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