Opinion: Joe Karam has to be super vigilant.  There are people out to use the notoriety that he has deliberately and determinably created out of David Bain, for comedy or social commentary as is quite normal in our society for any national events.  Given that he has gone to great lengths to manipulate the media in respect of information surrounding the Bain murders, now he has the constant task of having to police it and to try to ensure that every ounce of Bain information

Opinion: Last year in a preliminary action in which I tried to strike out parts of Karam's claim against us for being too long, too convoluted, often not defamatory and in general impossible to understand, I failed, because I put it in layman's terms and because my application was not technically correct.  However the message was transmitted in the English language, a language which is reasonably common in these parts, recognized not only the court as a primary language but also in government and in society as a whole.  I have reason to believe that Karam himself

Jeanette Thomas, the interviewer on TVNZ One Good Morning Show interview with Joe Karam says it all, with the help of the web page content writer who spells out 'Bane' as the name when it probably should be 'Bain'.  If you listen to the opening words of the video you will hear how the Bain case is described as one of the most infamous in NZ legal history.

Opinion: The $3.3 million spent on David Bain's legal defence and the further millions spent on the Prosecution, court costs and Justice Binnie's investigation into the compensation bid is a titanic waste of public funds, titanic because it is a rather large amount of money and titanic because it will eventually be shown that the whole defence argument is false and will sink inexorably to the bottom of the legal sea.  The first step will be Justice Binnie's recommendation which can only be that David Bain does not qualify for compensation, which will rip a large jagged

Opinion: The Bain case is a blight on the New Zealand justice system.  The guilty verdict was obtained through all the least admirable means and some means that were not altogether legally acceptable.  The verdict is a testimony to the power of money in the court room, and in this case, taxpayer money, over $3 million of it.  David Bain's chief advocate has acted in a manner which is reprehensible, in constantly vilifying a person who is dead, in order to po

Further to my previous blog on this subject, probably the best way to lay the Bain case to rest now is for the defamation proceedings between the people and Karam to go to trial.  This would provide an opportunity to have a public hearing of the manner in which Karam has represented this case to the public, and many people who are currently indoctrinated by his persuasive but ultimately faulty arguments will be

People who grandstand on a matter of public interest and concern should expect their actions to be criticized and should be tough enough to take the flak when it comes, because inevitably it will.  In politics you can be a rooster one day and a feather duster the next.  If politicians, and those people involved in public matters, sued their counterparts each time they were technically "defamed" (ie opinion lowered in the eyes of a right thinking person) then the courts would be super busy and every second lawyer would be a defamation specialist.

In my opinion the most interesting part of David Bain's speech in Perth is where he issues his diatribe at the Justice system.  This can be found at 26 minutes and 20 seconds into the recording on Scoop and is as follows:

On 13 March, members of counterspin applied for a hearing to have preliminary questions determined pre-trial in the ongoing defamation case brought against them by Joe Karam.  In response, instead of a notice of opposition to this application, came a request for a judicial settlement conference, which will now be held on 28 May, a date which was previously booked for a strike out hearing. 

David Bain has now substantially spoken in public, so we can now make some attempt to work out what makes him tick.