Gail Maney is appealing her conviction for the murder of Deane Fuller-Sandys. Photo: Jason Dorday/Stuff.
Lawyers on both sides agree there is no evidence implicating a woman convicted of a West Auckland murder two decades ago, as the first day of the appeal concludes.
Gail Maney was found guilty by a jury of ordering Stone to kill Fuller-Sandys after he stole some of her belongings, including drugs. The story was told in the 2018 RNZ/Stuff podcast Gone Fishing.
Deane Fuller-Sandys was a West Auckland tyre-fitter who went missing in 1989, and was initially thought to have drowned while fishing on Auckland's west coast.
In the Court of Appeal on Tuesday, Maney's lawyer Julie-Anne Kincade KC said the Crown had agreed there was no reliability to the evidence that implicated her client.
Gail Maney can be seen in a camel-coloured coat at the back of the courtroom. Her lawyer Julie-Anne Kincade is standing to address the judges in front of her. Photo: RNZ / Kate Green
When it was the crown's turn to speak on Tuesday afternoon, lawyer Mark Lillico confirmed that the evidence - which once pinpointed Maney as the one who ordered a hit on Fuller-Sandys, which was then carried out by Stone - was no longer reliable.
That evidence was the testimony of one witness, whose name is supressed, and was the only person to link Maney to the murder.
She later recanted, saying she was leaned on by police to give that story, and has since died.
Kincade said she had shared a written document laying out the problems with the evidence with the Crown's lawyers, Mark Lillico and Don Lye, who had expressed their agreement.
Lillico nodded as Kincade spoke.
Kincade also told the court she understood there was new DNA being tested, but Justice French pointed out that even if this returned positive results, it would not prove Maney had instructed Stone to kill Fuller-Sandys.
When it came to her client: "There's simply no case at all, there never was."
Evidence too contaminated for a retrial - lawyer
The lawyer for Maney's co-defendant Stephen Stone, Annabel Maxwell Scott, said the evidence against her client, too, was so contaminated it should be rendered inadmissible.
For this reason, they were seeking an acquittal rather than a retrial.
She cited unrecorded conversations, the feeding of information to witnesses, site visits before accounts were taken and the sharing of witnesses' statements between witnesses as reasons for the evidence being "irreparably damaged".
She said the evidence did not have "the ring of truth" to it, and the frequently changing story of one of the key witnesses in particular made his evidence "totally unbelievable".
Crown agrees there is no 'prima facie' case against Maney
Lillico confirmed on Tuesday afternoon there was no good evidence for the murder case against Maney.
"As at today, we don't have a prima facie [on the face of it] case in relation to Ms Maney," he told the court.
However, he maintained the evidence against Stone still stood.
"It couldn't have escaped anyone, including the defence counsel at trial... that the Crown case hinged on these four individuals, and there's no forensic evidence."
Therefore, he argued, their testimonies were tested rigorously during the trial through cross examination.
That jury had heard about the problems with the reliability of two key witnesses' evidence - the frequently changing stories and gradual aligning of them as they went through the interrogation process - and convicted them anyway.
But Lillico conceded the 1999 jury did not hear about the two undisclosed documents, which the Crown admits should have been disclosed to the defence, as they could have helped its case.