The defence has called a star witness at the Philip Polkinghorne murder trial.
Warning: This article contains content that could be disturbing to some people.
Professor Stephen Cordner is an Australian pathologist with a long history of high-level appointments and recognition.
His task, as defence lawyer Ron Mansfield put it to him, was to consider whether Pauline Hanna’s death was homicide or suicide.
Hanna, 63, was allegedly murdered by her husband Polkinghorne at their Auckland home at Easter 2021.
The Crown has said a suicide doesn’t add up and that Polkinghorne staged the scene after fatally strangling Hanna.
Prosecutors said the now 71-year-old was caught in a web of meth, infidelity and money woes.
In turn, his defence has painted a picture of Hanna as a woman working long hours in a high stress job, who had attempted suicide before and was on anti-depressants.
“It’s not rocket science,” Cordner said of his profession. “It’s a straight-forward application of medicine.”
“Some of what I’m going to talk about is pretty grim”, he said, apologising to jurors.
Cordner said he was looking for evidence of injuries, and patterns of injuries.
“That includes consideration of absence of injury,” he said. “The question here, is has the deceased been killed or did she kill herself?
“If she’s been killed then that means assault,” Cordner continued. “So then there are injuries that are commonly associated with assault.
“People who are strangled manually, or by ligature, also in a very significant number of instances have injuries of general assault.
“They’ve been beaten up,” he said.
“We’re looking for signs of injury, so that injury might be in the skin, usually it is in the skin but not always,” Cordner said.
There could also be internal bruising, he said.
Cordner was asked by Mansfield to further outline differences between deaths involving strangulation and self-harm.
He said most people who are strangled show other signs of fighting back to resist and defend themselves.
Injuries could also be inflicted on the assailant, he said.
Cordner said it was generally accepted a strangulation, by hand or by ligature, is very often the end point of a more sustained assault.
He said, in his view, there was “nothing incompatible” with Pauline Hanna’s injuries and a conclusion of hanging.
Defence lawyer Mansfield turned the jury’s attention back to what injuries Hanna did not have. He asked the witness if it was helpful or unhelpful that all of her acrylic nails remained in place.
Cordner said common sense would have it that there had not been any great disturbance of the nails. “That could be correlated with the presence or absence of injuries on the supposed assailant,” he said.
Mansfield asked Cordner whether he saw any signs of defensive injuries that would indicate a struggle.
Like other pathologists, the witness said he had not.
Cordner then spoke about signs of injury on Hanna, known as non-specific injuries. “The assaultive injuries that commonly accompany homicidal or ligature strangulation are numerous and severe in most cases,” Cordner said.
‘We’re not in the ballpark… where any pathologist would say we could conclude assault’
“I want to be clear,” he said. “We’re not in the ballpark of assaultive injuries, or the number and severity or location of injuries, where any pathologist would say we could conclude assault.”
Cordner said there was no pattern or distribution of injuries as were seen in 70% of homicides from strangulation. “In remaining cases, there’s pretty obvious reasons why that’s not the case,” he said.
Mansfield asked: “Ordinarily you would expect to see them, but we don’t here?”
“Yes,” Cordner replied. He said he would expect to see serious injuries in the neck or other injuries associated with assault.
“And, if those injuries are not there, I would expect to see a reason,” he said.
There was no evidence in pathology to support that Hanna had been killed by manual or ligature strangulation, he said.
The murder trial at the High Court in Auckland began in late July and is now in its sixth week.
Polkinghorne has always maintained that nothing sinister happened. He said he woke to find Hanna dead.