• Jay Maui Wallace pleaded guilty to killing his 60-year-old cousin in South Auckland after stealing a vehicle belonging to the victim’s partner.
• Justice Simon Moore sentenced the defendant, who insisted on being called only “Maui”, to three-and-a-half years in prison for manslaughter.
• An adherent of the fringe sovereign citizen movement, he has frequently clashed with the courts in the past. But there’s now hope, the judge opined as he reviewed the case during one of his last days on the bench.

A car thief and anti-Government activist with Mongrel Mob ties and a “shocking” history of violence killed his own cousin in South Auckland last year after the 60-year-old tried to retrieve his partner’s stolen vehicle.

Previously unpublished details of the homicide have been revealed in documents released to the Herald this week.

“Your offending was gratuitous and unprovoked,” Justice Simon Moore said during a recent hearing in the High Court at Auckland, referring to the defendant only as “Maui” — a courtesy the 50-year-old has repeatedly insisted on during previous court appearances for the manslaughter charge.

“[Victim] Leon Wallace was retreating backwards at the time the fatal blow was struck,” Justice Moore continued. “The punch to Leon’s head was unexpected. It took him by surprise and without any opportunity for him to defend himself or to take any self-protective measures.”

The defendant, born Jay Maui Wallace, has adopted many monikers that pepper voluminous court documents he has filed over the years opposing his detention for past crimes. The names also include Maui Warahi, Abdullah Maui Warahi and “Lawful Suveran being Maui Copyright Tangata-Whenua”.

‘I’ll knock you the f*** out, too’

His victim died in hospital of a traumatic brain injury on April 26 last year — nine days after he was attacked in the carpark of a Hill Park townhouse where Maui was known to stay.

Two days before the incident, Maui had shown up at the home where his cousin lived with partner Melody Hayes. During the visit, Hayes agreed to lend her Toyota Wish to her brother, who had arrived with Maui.

The car was never returned. Hayes’ brother told her the following day he had left the car with Maui to return to her.

Two days after the car went missing, Hayes reported the car stolen to police after she and Leon Wallace were unable to contact Maui.

“Ms Hayes also contacted the finance company who had a registered interest in the car ... to see if the finance company could track where the Toyota was,” according to an agreed summary of facts.

The trace was successful and she set out to the Hill Park townhouse with her partner in a car driven by their neighbour. Once there, Leon Wallace climbed over the security gate and found the missing car. But he also found the defendant.

“After speaking with him for a short period, the deceased walked away, back towards the security gate,” the summary of facts states. “However, he turned around after a short period, to see Maui walking up to him in a threatening way. The deceased walked backwards about five metres as Maui continued to approach him.

“Maui then used his left fist to punch the deceased with full force to the right side of his head. The deceased fell backwards, the back of his head hitting the ground. Maui stood over the deceased, who was now disoriented and barely moving. Maui kicked the deceased’s upper body area and then grabbed something out of the deceased’s hand, whose body was now limp. Maui then slapped the deceased twice in the face.”

In the minutes that followed, he tried to rouse his cousin, picking him up off the ground at one point and shaking him vigorously. He then opened the security gate and drove the neighbour’s car up to his cousin, who at that point was sitting in a plastic chair “barely conscious and severely disoriented”.

“Oh were you going to ring the police?” the defendant asked his cousin’s partner as she helped him put Leon Wallace into the backseat of the neighbour’s car. “If you ring the police, I will knock you the f*** out, too.”

Sovereign citizen strategy fails again

The attack and its aftermath were captured on film by at least two security cameras, police noted. Despite the strong evidence, Maui waited until two weeks before his August jury trial was set to begin before opting to plead guilty.

In October, as he was awaiting sentencing on the homicide charge, he had a brief taste of freedom when he was accidentally released from custody following a hearing in Manukau District Court for an unrelated matter.

He voluntarily returned hours later, when authorities realised their blunder.

Then last month he appeared in the High Court for the manslaughter sentencing before Justice Moore — the judge’s final sentencing hearing before retirement. No media were in attendance. Moore’s sentencing notes, along with the agreed summary of facts, were later released to the Herald on the eve of the court’s annual six-week summer closure.

Maui’s sentencing marked the latest chapter in a long, strange and often confrontational history with the court.

In June last year, a deemed not guilty plea to the manslaughter charge had to be entered on his behalf after the defendant fired his lawyer and refused to engage with Justice Sally Fitzgerald for a second week in a row. He repeatedly interrupted the judge during what was supposed to be a short procedural hearing, proclaiming that he was being illegally detained and that the judge was “misleading and falsifying a document” by entering the not-guilty plea on his behalf.

It was an argument he has leaned on frequently in the past, albeit with no previous success.

“Stop being so aggressive, Maui,” Justice Fitzgerald interjected at one point after she was interrupted again. “We’re trying to deal with you respectfully...”

She described his falsifying documents claim as “nonsense, frankly”

High Court at Auckland Justice Sally Fitzgerald. Photo / Michael Craig

The defendant is a long-time adherent of the fringe sovereign citizen movement, in which it is believed the courts have no jurisdiction over individuals.

The movement dates back to 1971, founded by anti-Government racists in the United States, according to the US-based Sothern Poverty Law Centre. Over the past 50 years, the white supremacist emphasis has fallen away but mistrust in the Government remains a central tenant, the organisation reports. It has many offshoots, including in New Zealand where it has taken on an anti-colonial flavour.

Followers are known for abusing the court system with what the advocacy groups term “paper terrorism” — gumming up the system with voluminous, often indecipherable court filings. A core belief of the movement is that the Government secretly swapped the established legal system for admiralty law and that there is a difference between the “corporate shell identity” of a person — noted by the all-capital letters on many legal documents, including often court charges — and the “flesh-and-blood” person.

Court documents show Maui tried to advance such an argument after his arrest in October 2016 on multiple charges. His arguments were rejected by the High Court and Court of Appeal before he asked the Supreme Court to weigh in.

“The documentation appears to challenge the jurisdiction of the courts over the applicant on Māori sovereignty grounds and assert that the applicant is himself sovereign and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of the Courts,” the Supreme Court noted. “Similar arguments have been rejected by this court in earlier cases. Nothing in the material provided to the court by the applicant calls into question the legality of his detention. His application for leave to appeal is therefore dismissed.”

In November 2020 he tried again, after he was accused of assault, obtaining by deception and breaching the conditions of his intensive supervision.

“Using the name Maui Warahi, the appellant says he is not the person Jay Maui Wallace and, moreover, that Maui Warahi is not subject to the laws of New Zealand, pursuant to which he is currently remanded in custody on various charges,” the Court of Appeal noted in a three-page decision dismissing the appeal, adding that it was an argument “that he has, under a number of names, advanced on many occasions before”.

One year later, while an inmate at Northland Region Corrections Facility, he again challenged the validity of his detention in a document that was quickly rejected as having no actual legal substance. High Court Justice Timothy Brewer stated in a concise two-page decision that if Maui was advancing sovereign citizen ideology, “then it would be an abuse of the process of the Court to consider it further”.

The Court of Appeal weighed in five months later: “Arguments along such lines have been consistently rejected by the courts as legally untenable, including several cases involving Maui.”

The defendant has had one notable High Court victory, albeit 24 years ago and unrelated to his sovereign citizen beliefs. In 2000, he was on trial alongside several others accused of a violent home invasion in which a couple was beaten so badly they both needed surgery. It was alleged that the male victim’s ex had arranged the raid and Maui was among several men who helped out.

A jury found the woman, Patricia Mahutoto, guilty of various charges but the case against Maui was dismissed six days into the trial.

‘Cause for optimism’

During his recent sentencing, Justice Moore saw reason for hope that the defendant may be at a turning point.

Moore determined a starting point for the sentence of five years in prison, taking into account the focus on the victim’s head and that more than one blow was delivered.

He then increased the sentence by 10% for his criminal history before allowing discounts of 15% for his guilty plea, 20% for his personal background and 5% for his remorse and rehabilitation efforts.

The end result was three-and-a-half years in prison.

Moore went on to explain that Maui had been “exposed to serious violence, trauma, alcohol and drug use from an early age” and left school at 14 while still illiterate. He suffered abuse in state care before becoming immersed in the Mongrel Mob “and descended into a pattern of drug and alcohol abuse and criminal offending”.He still suffers from PTSD as a result of the trauma, the judge noted.

High Court at Auckland Justice Simon Moore. Photo / Michael Craig

“It is clear to me that your upbringing predisposed you to violence and that the factors I have mentioned help explain why you came to offend against Leon as you did,” Justice Moore said.

But Maui has gone on to show remorse, including during the sentencing hearing, and has taken rehabilitative courses while in custody, the judge noted. He pointed out that the defendant had recently been granted compassionate bail to attend the tangi of a family member.

“You returned back to custody as required, which is an important change given your previous history of non-compliance and anti-authority views,” the judge said. “These are all positive steps worthy of recognition at sentencing.”

After announcing the sentence, the judge said he wanted to make a rare aside — something, he said, he reserved only “for cases where I believe there is cause for hope and cause for optimism”.

“You have a shocking criminal history of violence, some drugs, and disobeying court and other orders,” Moore continued. “For many of your age and stage it is simply too late to break the cycle of offending and you might be expected to be consigned to life in prison.

“But it does seem to me, and I hope not naively, that you have some insight into your actions which suggest ... that you may have turned a corner. I certainly hope so.

“This was your cousin you killed and you are going to have to carry that burden for the rest of your life.”

Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.