Mahvash Ikram
The Supreme Court has granted Scott Watson leave to appeal a decision last year that found there was no miscarriage of justice when he was convicted of the 1998 murders of Olivia Hope and Ben Smart.
At a hearing in September 2025, the Court of Appeal declined Watson’s bid to overturn the result of his 1999 trial, which resulted in him being found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The Supreme Court this week granted leave to appeal the decision in part.
The court will reconsider the reliability of the evidence provided by water-taxi operator Guy Wallace – the only person who saw the Blenheim-based pair alive before they disappeared without trace in Marlborough Sounds in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1998.
“The approved question is whether the Court of Appeal was correct to conclude no miscarriage of justice arose from the decision of the trial judge to admit the visual identification evidence of Guy Wallace,” the Supreme Court decision said. It dismissed all other grounds of appeal put forward by Watson.
The Court of Appeal hearing discussed Wallace’s evidence at length.
His initial description of who he believed was the lone man with Hope and Smart, which was markedly different to what Watson looked like on the night of the victims’ disappearance.
The police had exercised pressure to get Wallace to subsequently change his story, defence lawyer Nick Chisnall KC claimed at the hearing.
Watson also challenged several other aspects of the evidence, but the court decided it was “not in the interest of justice to hear and determine the other proposed grounds of appeal”.
He questioned the handling and alleged contamination of evidence – two strands of Hope’s hair that were said to have been located on a tiger-patterned blanket inside Watson’s boat.
The jury in the original trial was not aware two Environmental Science and Research Ltd (ESR) personnel handled the hairs, Watson claimed, and insufficient attention was given to given to the possibility of secondary transfer from contact earlier in the evening at an event where he had been present with Hope.
He also argued “transference” may have occurred when the police collected sample hairs from her home and in collecting them from the blanket.
However, the Supreme Court ruled this aspect could not be challenged.
“There is no direct challenge to the conclusion that the DNA sourced from the two hairs matched that of Olivia Hope. Rather, the focus is directed to the argument that the hair evidence was inadmissible because police and/or ESR mishandled it, risking contamination and/or transference…”
Watson further said the Crown case relied on a “two-trip theory” that implied that Watson first travelled to his yacht in the early hours of the morning and then must have returned to shore before he went back with Hope and Smart later. This, Watson claimed, was a “change” in the case over the course of the trial and he expressed concern over its impact on the decision.
But the Supreme Court said that matter had already been satisfactorily addressed during the Court of Appeal hearing in 2025.
Watson was convicted of Hope and Smart’s murders after a three-month trial in 1999. The victims were last seen boarding a boat in the Endeavour Inlet in the early hours of 1 January 1998 in the company of a lone man.
Watson first made a Court of Appeal bid in 2000, which subsequently failed. In 2020, then Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy referred matter once again to the Court of Appeal to determine whether there had been a miscarriage of justice.
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