No remorse, no law practice
Stuff reports:
A lawyer who smuggled contraband into prison for a convicted rapist and murderer, who she later married, is trying again to be readmitted as a lawyer.
Davina Reid (née Murray) was acting for Liam Reid in 2011, who is serving a preventive detention sentence for the 2007 rape and murder of deaf Christchurch woman Emma Agnew, and the rape and attempted murder of a second Dunedin woman.
Davina Reid reportedly continues to have a firm belief in his innocence.
Reid was struck off as a lawyer by the Lawyers Disciplinary Tribunal in 2015.
Lawyers can do something bad, be remorseful, and then be able to resume the law. I am a big believer that people should not be judged off the worst thing they ever did, and that mistakes should not punish you forever.
So if Davinia Reid realised how badly she behaved, and was remorseful, I would say 10 years of not being able to practice is enough.
But the reality is she has actually spent much of that time fighting and minimising the consequences of what she did. The timeline is:
- Struck off 2015
- Applied to be restored in 2022 on the basis her offending was minor and her “mana had been restored”
- Appealed to High Court
- Sought and declined leave to appeal to Court of Appeal
- Directly applied to Court of Appeal for quashing
- Appealed to Supreme Court
You need remorse for redemption.