08/06/2024
SkyGate: Judge Forrest finds former TVNZ News Anchor Guilty of Assault to Save Face for Police, Auckland Airport and Jacinda Ardern — in Red Herring Trial
Judge Calls for Law Change to Stymie Political Dissent while Setting a Legal Precedent for Attention Touching that Deflects Attention from Police Brutality
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Overview: The strange trial of a seasoned independent media duo reached its narrative climax on May 21 2024, at the Manukau District Court in South Auckland, New Zealand, following their spectacular arrests in 2023.
The prize of the case was an outcast media personality, former TVNZ news anchor, Liz Gunn (64), who had been brutally assaulted by a senior constable stationed at Auckland Airport.
Yet, it was Gunn who was found guilty by Judge Janey Forrest for ‘assaulting’ an Airport security worker.
Gunn, and her co-accused camerman, Jonathan Clark, who once worked for CNN and the Wall Street Journal, had also faced resisting arrest charges, after the judge dismissed two charges of trespass.
Previously, on ‘Court Soap’, it was revealed the media duo were arrested in 18 seconds flat by Police, who were sent to eject them from the arrivals lounge inside the International Airport, in the early evening of Saturday February 25 2023.
In this heretical dispatch, former Māori Television news, and current affairs editor, Steve Snoopman, proves with a snoop technique he calls ‘verdict vivisection’ that a red herring trial occurred.
He shows how four functions of ideology — distortion, legitimation, social integration and activation — that are essential for successful propaganda to brainwash a population, were present in the the trial proceedings, and were, in effect, ratified by ‘Forrest Law’. Thus, the ‘Red Herring Gunn Trial’ set a legal precedent.
In short, an attention-getting touch was turned into an attention-deflecting assault to distract from the Police brutality.
Drawing upon Professor T. Edward Damer’s classic book, Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, the Snoopman reveals numerous logical fallacies that were presented by Team Police Prosecution and accepted by Judge Forrest — who got ‘lost’ in the illogical legal woods.
By design, the trial was primarily aimed to save face for the Police, with a secondary motive to protect the reputation of Auckland International Airport Limited, and a thirdly, derivative objective to protect the Crown.
It was obvious to anyone in Court that the Police took a course to prosecute Gunn for assault, since she had been injured by an Airport Station Senior Constable, Erich Postlewaight, while his accomplice, Constable Robett Luong, injured Mr Clark. After all, a red herring logical fallacy occurs in an attempt to hide the weakness of a position by drawing attention away from the real issue to a side issue.
Once Gunn’s arrest became news, the Police doubled-down to protect the institution’s patchy reputation, as well as that of the Auckland Airport Company, and also of the defunct-Ardern Government.
Forrest laid down the law that a touch to get attention is assault in a hostile exchange. However, to pull off this logically fallacious argument, the authoritarian judge exercised judicial gymnastics to cast all the blame on the defendant — despite the obvious red herring tactic in play.
This adventure in judicial gymnastics hinged on the character assassination of the key defendant, who was cast by Police for a drawn-out scape-goating to resolve a potential crisis, since a Senior Constable assaulting a 63 year-old woman looked bad — no matter how many layers of lipstick a pig’s puckered lips may take.
The independent media duo had been waiting to film the arrival of a Tokelauan family, who had come to live in New Zealand following a cruel house arrest for refusing to be ‘vaccinated’ on the watch of Tokelau’s highest official, Ross Ardern, the father of Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister at the time.
To cast all blame on Gunn, Forrest ignored or denied the counter-evidence, after letting the case proceed despite finding that neither Airport SkyGate Security Coordinator, Anna Kolodesnaya, nor the two police constables, had adequately warned the pair that they would be trespassed. And although Postlewaight requested Gunn and Clark to leave, both Police escalated the calm scene into a fracas within seconds.
Moreover, Forrest let the case proceed despite the fact that Kolodesnaya conveyed the vague view to Gunn that the Airport Arrivals Lounge was “private area”. Kolodesnaya explained to the Court her incorrect comprehension that the Airport was privately owned. However, according to Auckland International Airport Limited’s filings with the New Zealand Companies Office register, at least 22% of the Airport Company’s stocks are owned by local and central government entities. In effect, this means the legs of the public can walk the Airport’s public areas exercising their freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights.
But, by this legal precedent, the bipedal public can only remain upstanding if they obey authority —even when those vested with authority are wrong. Indeed, Forrest conveyed this authoritarian view toward the trial’s end after the defence pulled the ‘keystone’ from the ‘archway’ of the New Zealand Crown’s case against a former TVNZ news anchor and a former CNN cameraman. Judge Forrest dismissed th trespass charges after a short recess, evidently to figure out (or consult about) the implications.
Forrest essentially took the cue of the lawyer for the prosecution, Jerome Beveridge, who clutched at legal straws.
In his summing up, Beveridge argued that the Police can’t be held criminally liable for their actions, if in the course of their duty they believe are right. With this telling faux pa, Beveridge’s overt plea was the logically fallacious argument of special pleading. The two police constables were not on trial for assault.
Special pleading — which Professor Damer located within the within the category of missing evidence — fallacies, occurs by ”[a]pplying principles, rules, or criteria to another person while failing or refusing to apply them to oneself or to a situation that is of personal interest, without providing sufficient evidence to support such an exception.” The ‘trunk’ of Police Prosecution’s ‘case tree’ was special pleading wood.
The dispute arose over the nature of the filming at the Airport. Kolodesnaya and other Airport staff, and the two Constables, had made the error of assuming a big camera equated with commercial filming, which required a permit, unless the enterprise is an accredited media organization. Neither the Police or the Airport SkyGate Security established what Gunn’s media entity was called, nor that it was a non-profit donation funded enterprise. Despite the accusing parties drawing the wrong conclusion, Forrest performed a neat trick to allow the resisting arrests charges to stand, while she dismissed the trespass charges.
Lawyer for the defence, Matthew Hague, had petitioned Judge Forrest that there was no way to separate the charges for trespass from the charges for resisting arrest, since the Police had neither allowed adequate time for the defendants to leave, nor to comprehend that they were under arrest.
Both defendants were off their legs at the point they were shouted at at that they were under arrest.
By allowing the resisting arrest charges to stand, Forrest could construe there was still a case to answer. Otherwise, if she had dismissed the resisting arrest charges on the first trial day — as she had with the trespass charges — the bad optics would have been obvious to anyone reading about the case in the newspapers, as it was to anyone in Court. Except, Kolodesnaya, whose sanctimonious ignorance the Judge doth entertained, when the Skygate Security official explained that people usually backed down when the police were called. Ergo, Gunn deserved a beating for asserting her rights.
Indeed, the authoritarian Judge Forrest ‘failed’ to ask herself critical counter-questions, which would have cut through the ‘wild mangled undergrowth’ served up by the Police Prosecution. If the Police subsequently found after the arrest, that they had reeled in Amnesty International filming incognito, would their counsel have advised proceeding to prosecution? Or, if the former TVNZ news anchor in question was Judie Bailey, would the Police Counsel have pursued the prosecution? Or, what if it was Lorde — who’d realized she had duped into lending her support to the Vaxathon — and who showed up with a big camera and microphone in support of Gunn’s call to greet the Patelesio’s at the Airport Arrivals hall?
In other words, because Liz Gunn had used her public profile in October 2021 to take a public stance against the Ardern Government’s draconian vaccine mandates to blackmail New Zealanders into taking Pfizer’s mRNA-LNP platform injecticides — the outcast media personality could be scape-goated.
The news media doth dutifully supplied the obligatory stigmatizing headlines to frame Gunn as an anti-vaxxer campaigner or anti-vaccine activist to cue their audiences that another of the nation’s common enemy was unhinged. Despite the media’s marketed image that newsrooms rigorously hold power to account, the ‘Fourth Estate’ of the so-called Western liberal democracies — are enmeshed with a global media cartel — and acts ‘intuitively’ as the peripheral nervous system to protect the other three estates — the legislature, the administration, and the judiciary; especially in election year.
It follows that a parallel construction of evidence occurred to cover up the culpability of Police, especially since one of the victims of Police brutality had a public profile and whose arrest had made headlines. Parallel construction is a fraudulent law enforcement process of building a parallel — or separate — evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to conceal how an investigation actually began.
I contend the real investigation began following news that the media duo were booked, and the Police Counsel realized the Constabulary’s vulnerability, since the Police assaults started within 10 to 18 seconds of the greeting the defendants. Ergo, a parallel body of evidence was constructed to support a red herring trial.
Therefore, in this third installment of courtroom theatre, “SkyGate”, Snoopman shows how this re****ed ‘case tree’ did not grow from a natural seed; but rather from a ‘red herring cutting’, from which grew a ‘special pleading stem’ into a ‘special pleading trunk’, that sprouted logically fallacious branches to sustain a brazen argument that could weather a budget courtroom’s fluorescent light.
These loudest and proudest logically fallacious branches were: drawing the wrong conclusion, using the wrong reasons, arguing from ignorance, omission of key evidence, misuse of a vague expression, manipulation of emotions, abusive ad hominem, and two wrongs; topped with a poisoning the well crown.
Yet, it is apparent that this re****ed ‘case tree’ had grown poorly in arid soil watered with fallacies of missing evidence, since it seems it was disingenuous for the Police to only supply video from just two CCTV cameras. By stalling with the video evidence, the trial could delayed long enough to have it occur around election time. Or, as it turned out, later. Either way, to mount a counter case against Police, whether criminal or civil, or both, would require funds since even modest lawyers have bills.
This re****ed ‘case tree’ also grew from the roots of the scapegoat archetype that is so ancient, it features in mythology; a fact that is an embarrassing indictment not only of New Zealand’s civilization within Western Civilization. But, also of humanity. Indeed, the ‘Forrest Law’ laid down with this verdict, in effect, endorses an evolutionary branch that might be called homo retardus.
Snoopman traces the origins of the scape-goating that occurred during the ‘Great Corona Hostage Crisis’ to the pandemic exercises scripted, designed and hosted by Johns Hopkins University. He shows how a pandemic simulation called Event 201 — that took place on October 18 2019, while the Wuhan outbreak was occurring — featured rhetoric about prosecuting people for producing ‘fake news’.
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr, found while writing his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, there were 17 pandemic exercises before ‘Great Corona Hostage Crisis’ that involved hundreds of thousands of people, who were programmed to work like automated parts of a machine once a global pandemic was declared. Kennedy stated that all 17 pandemic exercises favored mass vaccinations as the primary solution. He also observed that border shutdowns, business closures and quarantining of the healthy were frequent pandemic script elements.
The scenarios, Kennedy said, discounted the efficacy of existing therapeutics, avoided mention of the value of exercise, sunshine and healthy diet, or ignored the effectiveness of immunity boosting supplements.
The calculus underpinning this ‘Red Herring Gunn Trial’ was that the Police assaults on Gunn and Clark could only be dealt with in a separate trial. Conspicuously, neither of the two TV networks covered the trial, since to do so would have exposed the Constabulary to large audiences. To cast Gunn as an anti-vaxxer on trial for assault would have been embarrassing for the Crown-owned Television New Zealand.
The prospect of the obligatory voice-over with Gunn as a former TVNZ news reader being aired on 1News would have required dialling up all the news filters described by the Propaganda Model developed by Noam Chomsky. A TVNZ would have drawn heavy flak if its newsroom had presented coverage of the trial in full scape-goating mode. Especially, since the nation would have had to be shown the CCTV footage of a momentary light touch, contrasted with both defendants being assaulted on their way to the Arrivals Lounge floor in 18 seconds flat.
All the while, the assaults by the police — who had escalated their encounter with the defendants in accordance with an unspecified ‘game plan’ to remove the media duo from the airport — were the ever-present subtext recorded on the court tapes, that are only released if the case is appealed.
Thus, it would appear conversations were had with the gate-keepers at TVNZ and Newshub to ensure they were both a no-show at the Manukau District Court during the ‘Red Herring Gunn Trial’.
In the aftermath of Forrest‘s ‘guilty Gunn‘ verdict, former Police Senior Constable, Daniel Picknell said on Reality Check Radio, it was important to stick up for people in the Freedom Community when they get picked on. Picknell believes the trial was politically motivated.
Indeed, Forrest appeared to read the runes in the Police Prosecution's malicious projection of scape-goating blame on Gunn with her suggestion in footnote 6 of her verdict, that a review of the Airport Bylaws might be required to ensure a repeat of the situation did not reoccur. The District Court judge — who was seconded from Wellington to South Auckland in May 2022 two weeks before Mr Ardern was replaced as Tokelau's Administrator — surmised the nature of the intended filming was definitely political.
The sentencing proceeding of Gunn is set down for September 6 at 11:45am.
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