Graham Philips

Oh dear Deleted, I have to agree with you.
How can we possibly have a good debate if I keep on agreeing with you.
Should we start flinging personal insults?

I hear you are a hopeless sailor and don't know your port from your rum.

I don't know where I stand on this. I wanted to do some research to find out how regularly regularly is, but can't find any stats.

It's normal in NZ for
   * a person charged with a Category 4 offence to be held in remand without bail till their trial
   * for trials to take several months to start and then run for several months during which time the person is remanded

Examples:
   * Grace Milanes murderer waited 13mths for his trial without bail (2019)
   * Hayden poulter, NZS first serial murderer waited 12mths and plead guilty (1997)
   * A woman who bought a rape claim against her brother caused him to be remanded for 8months before his trial found him not guilty (2022)
   * Mosque terrorist/murderer was locked up for 13mths before his trial

Further it seems people who are bailed for cat 1-3 offences get to wait longer:
Example:
   * Waihope damage too gcsb satellite domes, bailed but waited 2.5yrs for court case (2010) and found not guilty even tho they did it. 

On the balance of all things I think that I prefer people charged with Cat 4 offences to be locked up until the trial outcome.   This is based on my assumption that not guilty verdicts happen substantially less than guilty ones. 

But it's gonna suck to the extreme if they are then found Not Guilty after being locked away. 

But by the same token, doesn't being out on bail cause as much heartache if you are innocent.... Waiting even longer for your trial with your life on hold. 

Some actual stats on how often Cat 4 charges are dropped or people are found not guilty would be interesting to support said assumption.

You've some very good points in here.
I've no idea what a cat 4 charge is, but I get the basic principle.
In cases where there is a dead body and a clear link to the charge, absolutely zero problem in holding people on remand. Grace Milan's killer, the serial killer. The mosque masacre was such a no-brainer I don't think we should even include it in the discussions.

The main issue with the Philips case is we don't know what he is alleged to have done, so we have to guess wildly, which makes for great forum banter.

But a good example is the Waihope 3. Depending on where you sit on the political spectrum, this could be a blatant attack on the security apparatus of not just our country but the free world (referring 5 eyes). Or it could be a bit of vandalism with honest but misguided motives that cost the govt a few $10's of thousands to fix. No one was actually killed, but it caused embarassment to our govt, that they can't keep key security infrastructure secure. Key point govt embarassment.

Now, where does Philips sit on the spetrum. Did he have 100kg of cynaide, and he was about to drop it into a water resevour? Lock him up forever.
Or had he found a technical way to take out a comms / cellular / internet system, possibly with the intent of thwarting the GCSB or SIS from spying on him and his mates, and by doing so would cause significant embarrassment to the govt?

For the sake of a good argument, I'm going to take the position that what he was doing / planning / did would cause HUGE embarrassment to the govt. This is on the basis that they don't want anyone to know what it was, and thus how easy it is to do. It is clearly something that is very difficult for the govt to make secure.

Noting he was initial charged with willful damage, aka vandalism. We don't have any dead bodies. We don't have any terrorism charges. So this sounds more on the 'Waihope 3' end of the spectrum than Grace Milan's killer.

Cutting a long story short, if what he has / was doing primarily causes the govt embarrassment, I think it is wrong to dick him around so much. If there was some malice in what he was doing, and it legitimately posed a threat to public safety, then yes, lock him up.

I would like to think there was a proper threat to public safety too. Taking out the cell phone network could be argued that people couldn't call an Ambulance. Around Auckland you can't get an ambulance anyway, so it would be tenuous to lock a guy up for 2 years pre-trial on that element alone. I am interested in the details of the sabotage charge and the element of risk to public safety. Andrew Little may well be liable to a charge for the state of the public health system?

Who is 'we'? I do know what he is alleged to have done. So I am clearly not part of "we".

I am confident that with a little more research you could find out as well...

And then we can both be the informed silent unable to argue our opinion

I can confirm that his name was suppressed and all the charges were suppressed, everything was suppressed, until just the other day.

Previous publication and discussion in the other thread was a breach of that suppression order.

The suppression order is understandable, but it’s also frustrating. It’s ostensibly there to prevent copycats, which it may well have done – it’s impossible to know.

It has also fostered confusion in a way that is likely to encourage the distrust that serves as the context of this situation in the first place.  As fish points out, there's an irony here, that a conspiracy theorist who believes the government is oppressive is now being held without trial and against his human rights. 

Until recently, Graham Philip had name suppression. His name was nevertheless plastered over social media, including this forum, in blatant violation of the court.

Many of those breaking the suppression orders outside this forum, did so under their own names. One person even did it on camera, in front of a room full of people. No one, it seems, has faced consequences. 

Suppression orders were placed verbally by the judge at a court hearing. Unless you’re in the habit of lurking around courthouses in the central North Island, and happened to be within earshot of that specific hearing, you wouldn’t know.

It's clear from other posts on here, that many have a distrust for authority, and are inclined to believe there’s a conspiracy between mainstream institutions (the Government, the police, the media, the courts) to suppress the truth. Prone to collecting morsels of information and mashing them together into a narrative structure, even if they don’t fit. If there are gaps, they fill them with whatever sounds right.

One day they see a picture of a friendly-looking man named Graham. He believes many of the same things they do. He’s in jail. No, they can’t know why. The MSM is not reporting it. Interesting morsels; the narrative writes itself.

Predictably, based on these bare facts, his supporters called him a political prisoner, jailed for wrongthink and held without charge. They called for Amnesty International and the Human Rights Commission to get involved. They raised money for him, and organised protests outside the courts. They even posted his handwritten letters from prison. Some called for retribution against authorities.

Few of these people knew what he was accused of doing, and many were incurious to find out. He was already the perfect character to slot into their narrative structure; the plucky truth-teller, crushed by the state. Those who knew what was happening could not correct the misinformation, because doing so would be illegal.

Name suppression has since lifted. You can now publish his name and the charges he faces.

This has probably made the situation worse. An ordinary man named Graham is facing obscure and sinister sounding charges of sabotage. How those two facts connect remains a secret; a hole in the narrative structure, begging to be filled in.

Since the NZ Herald published the existence of this case on Friday, the online dot-connecting has been rampant.

People inclined to both support and revile him, have come to wild conclusions, based on the meagre public details available about what he supposedly did. Unsurprisingly, the speculation tends to align with their existing views – an innocent man, held unjustly; a saboteur, rightfully imprisoned.

The end result is that potential copycats now have a rich vein of sabotage-adjacent ideas to tap, and the net amount of confusion in the world has increased. There are no winners.

He deserves a fair trial, which may require that details of the allegations not be publicly litigated beforehand.

It would be hard to engineer a situation more likely to increase distrust in mainstream institutions, which has come at a particularly unhelpful time.

An online community, primed to be suspicious of authority, knows one of their own is in prison, but the authorities say they’re not allowed to know why. Without concrete information, this community is free to haphazardly speculate, getting basic facts wrong and indulging their instinct that a conspiracy is taking place.

None of us who do know what’s happening are allowed to correct it, and are therefore unwillingly implicated in the conspiracy.

It’s likely that by the time we can write about this case fulsomely – probably not for more than a year – the horse will have bolted. These narrative structures will have had months to form.

Partial information can be as problematic as outright misinformation. Many of the conspiracy-fuelled explanations of the world, particularly involving vaccines, contain information that is partly true.

During a ranging infodemic, it pays to be alert to how this happens. Unfortunately, the court has given us an ideal example.

Plagerized from: www.stuff.co.nz/national/300616031/graham-philip-is-charged-with-sabotage-thats-all-we-can-tell-you