Wrongful conviction of David Lyttle

David Owen Lyttle is a New Zealander who was wrongfully convicted of murdering Brett Hall, his friend of 30 years. Hall was a drug dealer who had spent time in prison. He went missing from his property north of Whanganui in May 2011, but his body has never been found. The police focussed on David Lyttle as the potential killer, and ignored information pointing to a drug deal that went wrong involving Hall's criminal associates.

Police had no forensic evidence linking Lyttle to Hall's disappearance so after four years, they initiated an undercover operation called 'Mr Big' to target Lyttle. He eventually told an undercover police officer (Mr Big) he committed the murder and claimed he cut the body in half. He took police to two spots where he claimed body parts were buried. Police excavated the sites but found nothing. Nevertheless, Lyttle was arrested for the murder in 2014.

Due to a series of failures by police to disclose relevant information to his defence team, Lyttle's trial was subject to numerous delays. This included thousands of pages describing the undercover operation, hundreds of pages from police notebooks, and a copy of a statement from a police informant who said Hall was not murdered by David Lyttle but by an associate who had stolen drugs worth $200,000 from him. The police had access to all this information in March 2014, well before the Mr Big operation began, but never followed up on the informant's claim. Lyttle's defence team were not made aware of this statement by the informant until July 2017.

In February 2017, a senior police officer gave an assurance to the court that all police notebooks had finally been handed over. The following month another 600 more pages of material were disclosed for the first time. In 2018, a week after Lyttle's trial started, further disclosures came to light, and the judge declared a mistrial. The case finally went to trial in 2019. It lasted nine weeks, during which the jury heard hours of secret recordings from the Mr Big operation. Influenced by his 'confession' to Mr Big, Lyttle was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison - with a non-parole period of 11 years.

In November 2020, he took his case to the Court of Appeal. His lawyers were adamant he had only confessed because of enticements he was offered as part of the elaborate Mr Big operation. In March 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction, stating that virtually nothing he told the police as part of their Mr Big operation carried any credibility. The Court concluded: "A miscarriage of justice has occurred." Lyttle spent four years in prison before being released on 11 March 2021.