The man is on trial in the Wellington District Court, where he denies 16 charges, including male assaults female, suffocation, assault with a weapon, ill-treatment of an animal, supplying a Class C controlled drug to a young person, and common assault.
Crown prosecutor Wilber Tupua, in his closing today, told the jury the incidents occurred over two years, while the man was living with a woman, her teenage son and a dog.
It’s alleged that the man assaulted all three.
Tupua told the jury that during that time, the woman and boy were subjected to threats and violence at the hands of the defendant, who lashed out in anger.
“If someone does something he does not like, he gets angry, he gets violent,” Tupua alleged.
The pair were silenced and controlled, Tupua claimed, referring to what the woman had said in evidence.
The trial is being heard in the Wellington District Court.
“He made me a shadow of the person I used to be; he made me weak,” she had said.
Tupua urged the jury to believe the pair’s accounts of the alleged assaults, which the Crown said occurred in the house, car and on the property where they lived.
He said the pair’s accounts were supported by evidence from medical specialists and witnesses.
The man has maintained that his injuries from past accidents made it impossible to assault the pair in the way described.
But Tupua told the jury that the work the man did around the house, including fixing the bathroom floor, clearing a rat infestation and generally tidying the property, meant he wasn’t as incapacitated as he claimed.
“He is not the fragile, incapacitated, vulnerable person that he has made himself out to be, Tupua said.
In his closing address, the man told the jury the case was clearly one of police harassment, because he was well known to the police.
He also lashed out at the complainant, saying she’d had multiple breakdowns and been “psychiatrically binned”.
“This is just a woman who was fixated on me, and the feelings are not the same from me. I was a friend of hers, nothing more.”
As he has maintained throughout the trial, he insisted he fell on top of the woman after she’d kicked him in the groin.
“I have no reason to tell lies.”
He also referred to a long list of injuries, reiterating, once again, that they made him incapable of inflicting the violence and assaults that he is accused of.
His closing featured a series of themes that have been consistent throughout the trial.
He railed against ACC for allegedly failing to provide cover for his injuries and reminded the jury of the abuse he’d suffered in state care.
The man also spoke of the court’s failure to give him production orders so he could access prison phone calls, vast sums of money he claimed had been stolen from him, and alleged threats to his life from the Crown.
After a warning from Judge Peter Hobbs, the man made his final remarks.
“I had no means or want to ever suffocate a woman. She means nothing to me. She was a friend whom I was trying to leave after she stabbed me, put glass in my milkshake, and she was obsessive.”
Judge Hobbs is expected to sum up the case for the jury this afternoon.
Catherine Hutton is an Open Justice reporter, based in Wellington. She has worked as a journalist at the Waikato Times and RNZ. Most recently she was working as a media adviser at the Ministry of Justice.