Former ACT Party president Tim Jago during his trial in the Auckland District Court in August last year. Photo: RNZ / Nick Monro
Warning: This story deals with sexual abuse.
Former ACT Party president Tim Jago will argue he's suffered a miscarriage of justice in the Court of Appeal in June.
Jago was found guilty of sexually abusing two teenage boys he knew through a sports club in the 1990s, after a week-long jury trial in Auckland last year.
He was convicted of eight charges of indecent assault and jailed for 2 1/2 years by Judge David Sharp.
Interim name suppression orders prevented the media from identifying Jago for more than two years until he abandoned his fight for ongoing secrecy in February.
Jago maintains his innocence and had already signalled he planned on appealing his convictions and sentence in the Court of Appeal.
Today, Jago's lawyer Ian Brookie confirmed the appeal had been set down for hearing on 17 June in Auckland.
The grounds for the appeal are that "a miscarriage of justice" occurred because the jury reached an unreasonable verdict and the judge's summing up was unbalanced and incomplete relating to delay, the defence case and propensity.
Jago will also argue the jail sentence imposed was manifestly excessive, with home detention the appropriate sentence.
Survivor Paul Oliver has previously spoken about the relief he felt when Jago was finally named and how the pending appeal makes it harder to move on with his life.
Responding to Tuesday's update, he and his wife Lauren Oliver said the case continued to have a huge impact on those who were abused.
"It seems like a lot of time wasting and expense for Jago's own vanity project," they said.
"Mr Jago wasn't eligible for home detention because he was still insisting his innocence. That's why the prison sentence. He wasn't afforded sentence reductions."
They said the true miscarriage of justice was Jago still affording a high-profile lawyer when his victims got "paltry sums" at sentencing.
Miscarriages of justice are most associated with innocent people being convicted and punished for a crime, as recently seen in the Peter Ellis case.
More generally, Ministry of Justice statistics released in 2023 showed 893 people have had a total of 2303 convictions quashed, or quashed and remitted, since 2012.
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Sexual Violence
- NZ Police.
- Victim Support 0800 842 846.
- Rape Crisis: 0800 88 33 00.
- Rape Prevention Education.
- Empowerment Trust.
- HELP (Auckland): 09 623 1700, (Wellington): 04 801 6655.
- Safe to talk: 0800 044 334.
- Tautoko Tāne Male Survivors Aotearoa.
- Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) 022 344 0496.
