Teenager found guilty of murder
A jury has found teenager Taniela Kotoitoga Daven Tiako Waitokia guilty of murdering 87-year-old Harold Richardson in his Upper Riccarton home.
The jury delivered its verdict at 5pm after about five hours of deliberations, and after returning to the High Court to look again at Waitokia’s DVD interview with the police, and to ask a question.
Waitokia remained impassive in the dock, flanked by Corrections staff, as the jury was delivered at the end of the trial’s fifth day.
Justice Cameron Mander, who had summed up for the jury in the morning, then remanded Waitokia in custody for sentencing on February 16.
The jury had to choose between murder or manslaughter verdicts because 18-year-old Waitokia admitted attacking the elderly man with a brandy bottle.
The two knew each other before the August 1, 2015, attack. Richardson would buy stolen goods from Waitokia and his teenage friends, and the trial was told they would use the money to buy synthetic cannabis.
The Crown urged a verdict of murder citing the violence of the attack with 14 blows to the head evident from the post mortem, causing a fractured skull, broken eye socket and cheek bone, and broken bones in the arm and hand from the man’s efforts to defend himself.
Defence counsel Jonathan Eaton QC has called for a manslaughter verdict, saying that Waitokia had no intention to kill. He referred to Waitokia’s adolescent brain having been ruined by his smoking of synthetic cannabis.
Justice Mander thanked the jury members for their attention to the trial, and thanked counsel for the work that had pared back the trial to its “essential evidence” for the issues involved.
Category: News
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