Burglar 'suffered from Maori sickness' (Slice of Life DownUnder New Zealand)

A man who smashed his way into a suburban Christchurch house after threatening a woman occupant was suffering from "Maori sickness" at the time, a minister says.

The Rev Whare Kawa Kaa told Christchurch District Court judge Colin Doherty yesterday that after he diagnosed Adam Daniel Cooper's problem, and took action, the young man was cured.

"He's now got his memory back, got his mind back," said Mr Kaa, minister at the Phillipstown church, who has known Cooper for many years.

Mr Kaa said that the problem stemmed from Cooper's carrying a taiaha (long club) and a tokotoko (walking stick).

"It is only elders who carry these things around. The Maori sickness was upon him. That is the sacredness of carrying these things. It was like a curse had been laid upon him."

He asked Cooper's mother and father to bring the items to his house so that they could be blessed, and then he had them send the items away.

"Maori sickness was pretty strong in the time of our fathers and grandfathers. It is still happening if things are not done in the right manner."

Cooper, 23, had pleaded guilty to a charge of burglary, and was appearing for sentence.

He had met a drunken cousin who was arguing with two women outside a Linwood house.

Cooper threatened one woman and, when they retreated into the house, he and his cousin smashed the front door and windows and went in.

A male occupant fired a shotgun down the hallway. No one was hit. The man who allegedly fired the gun is awaiting trial.

Judge Doherty gave Cooper a substantial reduction on his sentence for his previous good character, his late guilty plea and because he had good support from his whanau. He jailed him for nine months, with leave to apply for home detention.

In 2000, Tariana Turia, who was then associate Maori affairs minister, questioned whether psychologists had the appropriate training to deal with issues such as Maori sickness (mate Maori).

Victoria University's head of Maori studies, Peter Adds, said mate Maori was a fairly common condition. "It's usually brought on when people believe they have broken a tapu and are paying the consequences."

They don't list them in their online store, but they had a large number of them made from 'twisted hickory' if I recall correctly.

I've never seen them anywhere else, though.

It's got a large burl almost the size of my fist on top which with use has been polished very nicely. It's a tough piece of wood which has seen much use in the last 4 or 5 years.

I can't seem to locate anything quite like it on the web or I'd post a link for you.

It was a very interesting place to tour.

Although truth be told I'm more of a single malt scotch kind of a guy now these days.

Uncle Jack and I no longer see eye to eye as it were.

> Just so I'm clear on your rules, do the Police make the decision to prosecute or do you have prosecutors or Grand Juries who decide that?

It depends. The Attorney General has ultimate responsibility for prosecutions.

Usually the AG ("Crown") prosecutes if there is a criminal case to be answered, based on charges laid by the Police.

The Police Prosecution Service is the principal prosecuting authority for criminal and traffic offenses that fall within the summary jurisdiction.

Some government departments (IRD, WINZ &tc -- the tax folk and the welfare folk respectively) and local governments can also prosecute.

Here it is also possible (not too common tho') to take out a private criminal prosecution: as one of our (brave) cops found out to his cost for shooting dead a nasty golf-club-wielding drug-crazed perpetrator named Steve Wallace in a small town called Waitara a few years back. The Crown declined to prosecute so Wallace's family and friends did instead.

Ultimately found "not guilty" the policeman's career in small-town NZ was effectively over, his health also in tatters. Huge personal cost to him and to his family.

Thanks for the info.

I'm always interested in the way other jurisdictions handle these sorts of things.

It's pretty different here.

If an offense is alleged by the PD then the Prosecutor takes a look at the case. Depending on the severity of the offense a Grand Jury (12 or so citizens depending) is convened to look into the matter and either indict or 'no bill' meaning no charges will be laid.

But since in a GJ proceeding no 'defense' attorney is allowed to the subject indictments can be fairly routine, although not always. Quite often, depending on where it happens, Grand Juries will refuse to indict in clear cases of self defense.

Prosecutors in those locales tend to call them as a matter of routine simply to insulate themselves from charges that they don't care about dead criminals or that they are encouraging vigilante justice or some such rot.

In some locales the family of the dead crooks can sue, but in many jurisdictions that option has been taken away so long as the killing is ruled legitimate by a GJ. These are the so called 'Stand Your Ground' laws you may have heard about.

Of course this is vastly over simplified as I'm sure some Lawyer type Freeper will kindly point out and laws vary wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

So from a legal standpoint it's best to be very familiar with your local laws regarding self defense. But you are already very familiar with my views on the matter on the personal level.

We have a saying that it's 'better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6'.

It sounds like your policeman got a really raw deal. Here our policemen are almost never prosecuted for killing someone, even a perfectly innocent citizen under very, very questionable circumstances. They can however be sued civily but even that rarely works.

There's a pretty interesting case out of Georgia where the cops burst into an old womans apartment late at night. She was obviously frightened, grabbed a pistol thinking she was being robbed or worse, and wounded a couple of the cops. They shot her to death.

Well it turns out the cops may very well have lied to get their search warrant so they're being prosecuted for 2nd degree murder, quite justifiably in my view.

It'll be interesting to see how that one turns out. IMO our LE folks are becoming way too quick to resort to massive armed force and 'no knock' warrants over even the most trivial of alleged offenses. It's high time some of them were called to account legally for it.

> People often mistake 'primitive' for 'stupid' when there's absolutely no correlation between the two. Simply because they lacked technology doesn't mean they couldn't use other means to overcome their environment.
>
> Or come up with some truly wickedly effective weapons.

That is an interesting and important point. Couple more examples:

Maori never discovered metal, but they did discover that greenstone (jade, or "pounamu" as they call it) is harder than steel, reasonably easy to work and carve, reasonably plentiful particularly in South Island, and holds a wickedly sharp edge. It's also lighter than steel but heavier than wood. In short, a perfect warmaking material: like titanium in some ways.

It can be made both into edged weapons of incredible strength, or into blunt instruments to thunk people with. Or combinations of the two. The "mere" (pronounced almost like "Mary" except with a soft "e" at the end, rather than a hard "y") is a good example. Most often now used ceremonially or for "kapa haka" (competitive dances) and kept blunt, it is still plenty heavy enough to give someone a bad headache or skull fracture.

Whalebone was used much the same way as greenstone. A whalebone "patu" was sharp, it was also a blunt instrument, and it had a wicked "hook" built into one of its edges. This was, I've been told, to rip out the enemy's rib cage at the solar plexus, or to rip off the enemy's goolies with a single nasty sweep. Ouch! Diabolically clever. Again, perfectly fit-for-purpose.

As with all of these weapons, there are Maori martial arts surrounding their correct use. Often now, tourists get to see some of this during a "kapa haka" performance, little realizing that they're not all just fun-and-games: only a tiny taste of a fairly complex warmaking capability.

Here is a link with a few photos of weapons: http://maorisource.com/MaoriWeapons.html

(It calls the taiaha a "long club", too: I have been brought to task several times by Maori for making the same mistake! It is correctly used, not as a club, but as I described in a previous post.)

Equally interesting, the Maori invented complex trench warfare long, long before it became fashionable in Europe. The earliest ones date from Maori's first settlements in NZ, circa AD900.

Their fortifications, called "pa", were complex and often quite geometrically beautiful. With plenty of nasty surprises in store for enemy infantry: dead ends, trap doors, false passages that eventually lead to steep passages that eventually lead to near-vertical passages that take the enemy plunging headlong off a cliff...

(the classic "long, slippery slope!)

Often they were built around natural landforms: "Lion Rock" in Piha is a good example, so are most of the extinct volcanoes in Auckland like Mt Eden. But often they were just built on hi ground, carved into the soil.

No wonder the British troops had difficulty defeating the Maori (which they never actually achieved, completely) -- the Maori were using a superior trench warfare technology, as longstanding experts, that wouldn't come into vogue in Europe until mid-18th Century and would only become obsolete during WW-I some seventy years later. The British would not have been exposed to this type of warfare, or at least not for long, anywhere else in the Empire. And, by this time, Maori were also accumulating muskets, becoming expert shots.

Their war canoes were very, very seaworthy: as well as being intricately carved works of art.

They figured out amazing poultices and medicines based on NZ plants to heal war wounds: some of these are still used by NZ athletes, and they seem to work.

They were cannibals (there wasn't much else by way of protein available in NZ before the European settlers introduced cattle, and not many of their tribes were adept at fishing on any large scale) and they developed fairly sophisticated technologies for cooking and preserving their dinner.

("Cannibalism and ugly weapons! Ewwww Yuck!" we may say, but that is from our Western perspective. In fact, Maori were *the experts* of ad-hoc, improvised warmaking technology, and they improvised and adapted to suit their specific needs and challenges. Pretty clever indeed.)

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