• A jury failed to reach a verdict in the manslaughter trial of a 29-year-old man.
• He was accused of beating his partner so severely that she exited a moving car to escape him.
• The trial hinged in part on the couple’s young son, who gave evidence contrary to what he had earlier told police.

Despite an unusually long period of deliberations, a jury was declared hopelessly deadlocked today in the manslaughter trial of a 29 year old who admitted striking the mother of his four children during a violent argument as they drove through a South Auckland neighbourhood.

Justice Michael Robinson declared a hung jury this afternoon, sending the group home a final time following 37 hours of unfruitful deliberations that started on Thursday afternoon last week.

“I can see you’ve been working diligently for pretty much a week now, and I have no doubt you acted in accordance with your oath,” he said as he thanked them and sent them off. “As you’ve seen, it’s not always easy sitting in judgment of other people.”

The defendant – who continues to have name suppression to protect the identity of the Crown’s main witness, his 12-year-old son – was also sent home on bail to await a possible retrial. The Crown has indicated it will decide by early next month whether it will seek a second trial.

The woman who died also cannot be identified to protect the child’s identity.

The High Court at Auckland trial had hinged in part on whether jurors were more apt to believe what the defendant’s son said in a police interview on the morning after the incident, or whether they put more credence in what the boy told them under oath over a year later.

Crown prosecutor Charlie Piho described the then-10-year-old’s initial account as “doing his best to recount what was raw, what was real, what the truth was”. It was, Piho said, “an assault with [the defendant] being violent with [his partner] just before she jumped out of the car”.

Fright-response manslaughter occurs when a victim acts in a manner dangerous to their life out of fear of another person. The Crown has alleged the woman jumped out of the moving vehicle on the night of October 16, 2023 – resulting in a catastrophic head injury – because she feared a severe, continued beating at the hands of her spouse.

“The truth is he lost it,” Piho said, suggesting that the defendant turned a verbal argument into a ruthless beating after his partner threw fried rice at him and said she had thrown the keys to his beloved Harley-Davidson motorbike in the grass near the Chinese takeaway restaurant they had just left.

The defence agreed the argument turned violent at one point but disagreed about its duration and who started it. By throwing the hot food on her spouse, the woman is the one who kicked off the violence, it was suggested.

A man is on trial for "fright response" manslaughter in the High Court at Auckland after his partner fell to her death from a moving car along McKenzie Rd in Māngere. Photo / Google

Prosecutors acknowledged that the defendant was heard yelling, “What the f***?” at the scene and seemed to regret almost instantly what had happened. The two had been together since they were teenagers and were described by witnesses as good parents.

“Regret does not take back the fact [he] continually punched his partner in a fit of violence,” Piho said.

In his police interview, the child described a history of domestic violence between his parents in which “a lot of physical stuff would happen”, including his mother throwing things at his father and his father pushing her to the ground. Jurors heard a 111 call from months earlier in which the woman described being fearful of the defendant following an argument, but she brushed off police when they showed up at her home the next day.

“It shows her willingness to cover for him but also, of some significance, her fear of him,” Piho said. “You might have thought [the fear] was palpable in that 111 call.”

On the night of her death, the woman had first walked off at the takeaway restaurant saying she would have her sister pick her up – a solution that could have been the end of the ugly episode, Piho said.

“But he didn’t leave it there,” he said. “He took matters into his own hands and he forcefully pushed [her] into his own car ... while she was crying. He was angry and he wanted his prized motorbike keys back.”

When the violence began inside the car, the boy repeatedly told his father to stop, he told police the day after the incident.

“He punched her again, but even harder than before,” the boy told police. “I never, ever seen him fight like that before.”

Piho said it was understandable that the boy’s account changed and that he agreed with most things defence lawyer Andrew Speed said after he introduced himself as, “I’m your father’s lawyer.”

Appearing in court via audio-video feed, the boy accepted the defence’s suggestion that his mother was the aggressor and his father only hit her with an open hand instead of a punch. He agreed he didn’t see most of what occurred because his father had thrown rice in his eye and he had an obstructed view from the back seat, he said. He also agreed that he would have been tired and hungry during the police interview so his statement wouldn’t have been as accurate as in court, after he’d had years to think about it.

Neither side accused the young witness of being deliberately untruthful. Piho simply asked jurors to use their “collective life experience” to determine which version rang true.

He asked jurors why the woman would have leaped out of a moving car if the argument had subsided and there was nothing to fear.

“You may think the defence case is far-fetched in the extreme,” Piho added. “It doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t stack up.”

Crown prosecutor Charlie Piho. Photo / Michael Craig

Defence lawyer Andrew Speed agreed that it didn’t make sense – the woman’s irrationality, he argued, was the point.

While the Crown wanted to focus on his client, Speed noted it was actually “two people who lost the plot”, displaying “disgraceful behaviour” in front of their son.

“The deceased threw fried rice ... [and] attacked the defendant - you might think hardly the actions of a fearful person,” he said. “This isn’t a case about fear. The evidence simply doesn’t support this.

“This is a case about a woman with a brooding anger, opening the door ... unforeseeably falling and hitting her head... Leaving that car was so disproportionate to the accused’s conduct that it was irrational.”

To find the defendant guilty of fear response manslaughter, jurors needed to determine that a reasonable and responsible person could have foreseen the woman acting as she did. But Speed said her response was “completely unpredictable”.

He noted that the couple’s son told police of prior arguments between his parents: “She always, like, opens the door and says she’s going to jump out.” But up until that night, those threats were never carried out so it would have seemed to the defendant another case of “crying wolf”, the defence lawyer said.

Speed also argued that, contrary to the timeline presented by the Crown, there were “lots of stops” in which the woman could have got out safely.

In his own interview with police, the defendant acknowledged hitting his partner but said it was just once as his partner tried to put him in a headlock and he feared losing control of the vehicle. He then stopped the vehicle to avoid hitting a car on the side of the road, at which point she could have exited, he said. Things had calmed down by the time she left the vehicle about 30 seconds later, the defence suggested.

Speed acknowledged his client’s actions were far from “some sort of gold standard” of how to react. But it was self-defence in response to the woman’s violence, he said, adding that the single strike appeared – at first – to have achieved its purpose and calmed things down.

The manslaughter trial took place in the High Court at Auckland. Photo / File

Speed dismissed the idea of the woman being a long time victim of family violence, adding that the previous 111 call was “completely unreliable” because the woman backtracked the next day. He then took the point a step further.

“You might think this is an insight into the deceased,” he explained. “She’s very capable of over-dramatising and over-reacting – calling police and making allegations that are completely untrue.”

Speed also discounted blood that was found on the passenger side interior roof of the car, which the defendant admitted to police must have been from him hitting his partner. His lawyer, however, described the blood evidence as “very indecisive” – only a small amount and unable to be aged.

Speed suggested that instead of seeing red when rice was thrown at him, his client’s response was to say in a tone more of exasperation than anger: “Stop throwing the food... The kids are hungry.”

“This is not a relationship of violence – on the contrary, a relationship of equals,” he said, describing the couple as “two strong people doing the best for their children”.

“This is not about fear. This is about anger. This is someone who’s made a bad error of judgment [deciding to exit the vehicle]. That’s the nub of the defence case.”

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.