Late yesterday a judgement from the Court of Appeal was released and promptly written about by David Fisher at the NZ Herald. The salient points from the article are
An attempt by the blogger Cameron Slater to use a journalist’s legal protection for sources has failed.
The Court of Appeal has now rejected arguments by Slater that new evidence should overturn Justice Asher’s ruling and allow him to engage source protection rules for journalists in the Evidence Act.
You can read the actual judgement at the end of this post or from here.
In essence Cameron Slater failed in his bid in the High Court to be forced to reveal his sources:-
[9] Mr Blomfield sought discovery, and that interrogatories be answered. The former referred to “all email correspondence between” Mr Slater and other persons who were allegedly involved in the supply of material to Mr Slater. Those persons were Mr Powell, Mr Spring, Ms Easterbrook, Mr Price and Mr Neil. The notice to answer interrogatories included a question about the source of the alleged defamatory material published on Mr Slater’s blog site. The question was:
Who supplied [Mr Slater] with the hard drive and other information referred to on the Whale Oil website?
Slater had been given an opportunity to appeal to the Court of Appeal and had failed to do so in the time given. So he subsequently appealed to be able to introduce new evidence to that court.
Now for anyone who knows how the courts operate in NZ, this seems like a tall order for a civil case. The Court of Appeal has a narrow brief. It monitors the judgements of the High Court for the soundness of their judgement, and usually only deals with what was presented to the High Court at trial. As the C0A said in its judgement (I dropped the references and reformated the quoted – read the judgement for the original):-
[17] The Court’s approach to applications under r 45 is settled. The position was explained in Erceg v Balenia Ltd:
[The] requirements are that the evidence be fresh, credible and cogent. It will not be regarded as fresh if it could, with reasonable diligence, have been produced at the trial …
[18] This approach reflects observations made by the Court in other cases to the effect that litigants have a duty to adduce at trial all their evidence, which is reasonably discoverable and evidence which is not fresh should only be admitted in exceptional and compelling circumstances and where it is credible and cogent. As with any other evidence, the evidence must be admissible and relevant; this is part of the cogency test.
Cameron Slater had to produce evidence that could not have been heard at the High Court trial, or it had to be credible and cogent to the case heard at the High Court.
This was and should have been quite apparent at the outset of this appeal to get leave to introduce new evidence. But frankly Cameron Slater and his small remaining cohort of associates are what I call “legal idiots”. They clearly didn’t understand this was what they had to do. They tried to bullshit and bamboozle three Court of Appeal judges! FFS how stupid can they be?
Much of what they produced was hearsay and even double hearsay evidence (ie I heard that someone said) which was immediately discarded by the court as being irrelevant. And they really produced a stinking pile of other irrelevant and unrelated crap that the judges looked at.
The C0A judges kindly described much of it as
[19] Before dealing with particular aspects of the affidavits, some general observations are appropriate. First, it is often not possible to tell from the content of the affidavits whether they are addressing matters that have arisen since the judgment in the High Court. It is Mr Slater who has the onus of establishing that the evidence is fresh or could not with reasonable diligence have been discovered so as to be adduced at the trial. Failure to discharge that onus means the evidence cannot be adduced. Second, the affidavits are full of hearsay statements which cannot be admitted. ….
followed by an striking example of double hearsay.
[20] This passage contains double hearsay and is therefore inadmissible. It is also unspecified as to the time when Mr Price is alleged to have had the concerns referred to and so the evidence is not cogent. Nor is any explanation provided as to whether or not the evidence could have been provided at the hearing in the High Court, and so it is not clear whether or not the evidence is fresh.
[21] Numerous other examples of similar difficulties with the proposed evidence could be quoted from the affidavits on which Mr Slater seeks to rely, but that is unnecessary. It will be sufficient if we focus on the principal points that he now seeks to derive from particular passages in the affidavits.
In essence this left just a few kernels of possible material the could possibly have some relevance. Like all conscientious members of the judiciary, the three judges picked through the dripping fecal mess that Cameron Slater and his moran associates had surrounded them with.
The first was that Blomfield had made and succeeded in obtaining a restraining order against Marc Spring, one of the people whom he was seeking to find the “email correspondence” with Slater, because of continued vile and toxic text messages (I read Judge Dawson’s District Court judgement Blomfield v Spring [2015] NZDC 5882). The C0A judges found that (my notes in italics):-
[24] We note that the text messages on which Mr Blomfield’s application was based had various dates between 13 August 2013 and 20 September 2014. Mr Beresford [Blomfield’s lawyer] claimed that the application was only taken at a point when Mr Blomfield was not prepared to continue receiving the text messages having earlier requested that they desist. In any event, many of the text messages were before Asher J, and addressed by him in his judgment, which was delivered on 12 September 2014. As we have said above, Asher J characterised them as involving Mr Spring sending Mr Blomfield aggressive and abusive text messages to which Mr Blomfield adopted a relatively defensive position.
Basically that the majority of these texts had been part of the High Court trial, and that they were addressed there. Therefore they weren’t new evidence.
[25] The fact that Mr Blomfield chose to apply to the District Court under the Harassment Act does not in our view amount to cogent evidence in relation to any finding made in the judgment under appeal.
Which is completely valid.
For Marc Spring try to hide his obnoxious digital personality behind a court simply isn’t acceptable. I’ve had to boot the miserable arsehole off here after having to remove the defamatory and just plain vile comments he has left behind in many different pseudonyms (and no, I won’t say what those were – read our privacy policy). I have also threatened him with pursuing a restraining order after he started wasting my time with abusive and idiotic emails that just displayed to me just how god-damn stupid and out of control he was.
The second nugget the the court looked at was from several affidavits from a Shiv Mutta. There apparently relate to a business dealing that he had with Blomfield and several others as part of what looks like a routine pleading and provision of token restitution of a failed business (of which Mattu was the sole director) to the IRD and liquidators. This is apparently, from the judgement, part of Blomfield’s current profession.
Presumably Mattu was in a bind for unpaid taxes to the IRD and missing and/or disputed money to the liquidators. Shiv Mattu was claiming that after the deal was made that Blomfield was being intimidatory. Quite how never became apparent in the judgement, as the statements in the affidavit look like routine warnings from a professional to a client about drawing too much attention to himself from the IRD or liquidators. Either could drag him to court if they thought they could extract more from him than they got out of whatever was plead for on his behalf.
The only interesting thing was related to a recorded phone conversation, which really just displays the paranoid incoherence of Cameron Slater and his cohort of similarly deluded dickheads. I will put it out in full because it is just so hilariously stupid (my bold at the end).
[33] In his submissions, the main emphasis Mr Slater gave this second affidavit related to the fact that Mr Blomfield had telephoned Mr Mattu on Monday 5 October 2015. Mr Mattu recognised the caller’s number as that of Mr Blomfield and decided not to take the call. Instead, he telephoned Mr Slater to seek his advice. Mr Slater was unavailable, but an associate, Mr Nottingham, advised him to take the next call from Mr Blomfield and to record it. It was then arranged that instead Mr Mattu would telephone Mr Blomfield while Mr Nottingham remained on the line and both would record what was said. That then ensued, the discussion lasting for some 26 minutes. A little over an hour later, Mr Mattu again telephoned Mr Blomfield while Mr Nottingham was on the line. This time, the conversation lasted a little
under four minutes.[34] Transcripts of the discussion were then drawn up and attached to Mr Mattu’s affidavit. The presiding Judge in this Court asked Mr Slater to identify the parts of the transcripts of the phone discussions which were of most concern. Mr Slater referred to the following passages attributed to Mr Blomfield:
[35]
(a) Your affidavit wasn’t even written by you Shiv. I, the affidavit …
I’ve matched it up with the previous stuff that [Mr Slater] and
[Mr Nottingham] have written. Those guys wrote this affidavit for
you, and what’s going to happen when you have to stand up in
Court, and the first question the lawyer’s going to ask you when they
cross-examine you is “Who wrote this affidavit?”(b) But what you’ve gone and done with these boys, and getting
involved with them, I wanted to ring you and make it clear to you
that I have no issue with you, and I wish you all the best, and I’m
sorry for what happened. But I’m not going to talk to you again, and
I’m not going to have anything to do with any of this, for as long as I
possibly can. If I’m forced to be involved, I’ll be involved, but I
want to stay right away from this, the people you’re involved with,
everything to do with it. I’m going to stay as far away as …(c) As far as I’m concerned, you’ve gone and partnered up with the
devil, and you’re asking me … I want to stay as far away from you
and these people as possible. All I wanted to do was make it clear to
you that I am not going to do anything mean to you. I feel sorry for
you for what’s happened, and I’m sorry that things haven’t turned
out.Mr Slater invited us to infer from the language used that these comments by Mr Blomfield were in fact veiled threats, that the observations were intimidatory and effectively asking Mr Mattu not to stand by his affidavit. We are not prepared to draw those inferences.
Which since Blomfield essentially said that Shiv Mattu was working with Cameron Slater and his associates like Dermot Nottingham, is something that any rational person would have said.
After reading some of the crap that Cameron Slater and Dermot Nottingham have put in front of various courts, I can testify that they do have a rather distinctive ‘legal’ tone. It is paranoid, delusional, full of fecal irrelevancies (bullshit), and with an ‘interesting’ way of arguing legal principles. It is like trying to listen to Jimmi Hendrix playing a National Anthem at Woodstock and inferring the words (or legal basis) from the distortion. But like that version of the Star Spangled Banner, it is largely an appeal to people who like them have no frigging idea about the law or legal process.
Anyway, Blomfield in those passages said in essence ‘we’ve done our business, and because of the arseholes that you’re associating with I want nothing further to do with you’.
Seems like a fair viewpoint to me when one of them is someone you are suing for defamation.
Anyway, that appears to be how the judges saw it as well.
[41] The application for leave to adduce further evidence is dismissed.
[42] The appellant must pay the respondent’s costs calculated as for a standard application for leave to appeal on a band A basis and usual disbursements.
In other words, no appeal, and the morans reading Whaleoil can expect to get a further demand for money to run “the server” and to buy tee-shirts. I wonder how long their stupidity will last on this constant barrage of failure and bullshit.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Cameron and his pack of delusional “justice campaigners” in their pursuit of ineffective pursuit of of power and personal adulation for their stupidity try to get this to the Supreme court. But I fail to see any grounds that court will accept. Certainly I’d enjoy to their comedic antics continue. It is enlightening just how amusing some dumb some undiagnosed paranoid megalomaniacs can be. I look forward to Mike Hosking trying to top this performance.
But I guess in the mundane and functional universe that I inhabit, that I will just have to look forward to Cameron Slater finally have to face the defamation hearing in the High Court that he has been avoiding for years. I promise to come and watch… Bringing surreptitious (and metaphorical) popcorn.
A word of warning. The words “Dermot”, “Nottingham” and the “laudafinem” website are all banned in this post. Because of the mechanism used, that means across the whole site. Anyone using them irrelevantly or anything that I think relates to them will receive an immediate 8 week ban. You may use the first two, but only related to this case. Since they go into spam, I’m on the other side of the world and about to go to bed, it may take some time for them to achieve visibility.
Anyone related to the laudafinem or Marc Spring is unwelcome here. You will receive an immediate 5 year ban if I suspect your handle is related to them. This is because of their widespread abuse of the right to comment across several sites in recent days. Clearly they are upset about this judgement, but I don’t want that to impact on this post. There are other blogs that welcome paranoid delusions.
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