OPINION
You very seldom see acts of mercy in a courtroom and it did not entirely seem to be on the cards in the High Court at Auckland yesterday morning when a woman appeared for sentencing after being convicted for the manslaughter of her plainly adorable daughter Arapera Fia, beaten to death when she was 2 years old.
Nikitalove Brampton Tekotia, 24, was charged with failing to protect her child.
The charge was exactly as it read on the packet: she failed, acutely and profoundly, to look after and save Arapera, killed by Nikita’s vain and brutal part-time lover, Tyson Brown, who was found guilty at his trial in March 2023 and given a life sentence (15 years non-parole) by Justice David Johnstone.
The same judge assessed the case of Nikita Tekotia yesterday . He made stern noises about her “gross negligence”, regarded that the seriousness of her crime warranted a starting point of four years imprisonment — and then proceeded to calculate the discounts, for her age, her “fragile mental state”, her character reference from her pastor, and silenced the courtroom when he sentenced her to 12 months home detention. She had hung her head in shame and wept during sentencing.
Court staff were instructed to bring a bucket in case she was sick.
A few minutes after sentencing she was in great spirits with family among the muffins and sausage rolls at QC’s, the court café. Mercy acts fast.
It could all have quite likely reached much the same outcome nine months ago. She was supposed to be sentenced alongside Brown in May last year. She had pleaded guilty to manslaughter. But then she changed her mind, and attempted a rare legal tactic known as vacating a plea: she wished to plead not guilty.
The rarity of the tactic is that it seldom succeeds. Nikita’s attempt — which dragged through the High Court, and saw her get rid of two defence lawyers — was poorly argued, and, surprisingly for absolutely no one, futile. Her application was rejected. It counted against her at this morning’s sentencing.
Tyson Brown was charged with murder after the 2021 death of 2-year-old Arapera Fia.
Justice Johnstone said her original plea of guilty warranted a generous 15 per cent discount but her attempt to plead not guilty took it down to 5 per cent.
Well, whatever. “A sentence of home detention,” said the judge, “is the correct one.”
Arapera died at Auckland’s Starship Hospital just after midnight on November 1, 2021.
The catalogue of her injuries was abominable: bruised from head to toe, fractured vertebrae, brain bleed. Cause of death, blunt force head injury.
A pitiful exhibit was placed in front of the courtroom during Tyson Brown’s trial: a bright little plastic slide, three steps high. It was so light that the Crown prosecutor held it up in front of the jury with one hand.
Arapera fell off it, said her mother and her mother’s sometime partner. She cracked her head, they said. The impact killed her, they said. It did not.
On the last day of Arapera’s life, immediately after she suffered a beating the Crown accused Brown of delivering and Brown’s defence accused Tekotia of delivering, they searched Google with questions such as, “how to wake up a baby after being knocked out” and “how to wake up a baby after being choked”. They waited more than two hours before they finally called 111.
Emergency services found Arapera face up and unresponsive and immediately noticed bruising on her chest, torso, face and forehead.
Brown and Tekotia wailed in the background.
They were an attractive couple. He was tall and slender, a brown-eyed handsome man with a long, sleepy, Snoop Dogg-like face. She was very pretty, appearing in court one day last year in a white patterned dress over black tights. They were 21 when Arapera was killed. “You made me feel the love no one has ever made me feel!” she texted Brown, two weeks after he murdered her child. “Every time I seen you I would get tingly.”
It was a lockdown death. Brown tested positive for Covid, and was forced into isolation with Nikita and Arapera. Three lives, stuck together, no escape; Brown and Tekotia were described in court as having on-again, off-again relationship, not a whole lot of commitment.
From another text by the expressive Nikita, to a friend: “It kinda wasn’t even his choice to come here, he wanted to stay at his but because he’s been around me more than his family they told him he had to come here zzz.” Zzz was the least of it. It all went to hell.
Two-year-old Arapera Fia died on October 31, 2021. Photo / Supplied
Witnesses at Brown’s trial talked of hearing him yelling at Arapera: “Get the f*** up!” And: “Stop crying!” Also, that old favourite: “Shut up!”
On the day that paramedics were called to the house in South Auckland, a flatmate texted Arapera’s father Malcolm Fia about Brown: “He’s a bitch. Been yelling at [Arapera] and smashing s***.” Brown didn’t want to be there. Arapera had no choice.
As for Nikita, she was up against it, stressed, everything narrowing to a point of no return. She broke up with Arapera’s father, Malcolm Fia, in early 2021.
Lockdown removed her from family and childcare. She worried about having enough food.
All this was actually itemised by Brown’s defence lawyer, Lester Cordwell, but without any sympathy: he laid into Nikita for three long, tough days at his client’s murder trial, accusing her of snapping, of throwing Arapera against a wall, of killing her own baby.
The jury preferred the police case that Tyson Brown killed the baby.
Crown prosecutor Luke Radich had told them, “The contusions on Arapera’s head were too many to count.
Probably we’ll never know how he did it — punching, throwing her against a wall, shaking her, or a combination of all of those.”
Not the father, not in any way related
There is a kind of motif in trials of men who kill children in New Zealand: they’re not the father, they’re not in any way related. They’re sleeping with the child’s mother, maybe shacked up, maybe passing through. The kid is something in the way. The kid is a drag. The kid needs disciplining …
Brown emerged as this stock character during his trial. There was no mystery to him, no ambiguity, just frustration and malice.
Nikita Tekotia, though, presented as someone more complex, someone caught in a cycle of domestic abuse, which she had known all her life. She tried to get away from Brown. She tried to get Arapera away from Brown.
“She did all she could,” said her third and most effective lawyer, Emma Priest. But Nikita tested positive for Covid, too, and found herself in a kind of prison: she and her gorgeous kid were trapped in their home at Gibbons St, Weymouth, at the mercy of Tyson Brown. He had none to show.
She was charged with manslaughter 15 days after Arapera died.
Counties Manukau launched a swift and efficient investigation, and arrested her the same day as Tyson Brown, charging him with murder. Both pleaded not guilty.
They were set to face trial together in March 2023 — but in the first of her very circuitous dealings with the High Court, she formally admitted the charge three days before the trial was due to begin. “I plead guilty,” was all she said on the morning of March 2, during a brief hearing in front of Justice Johnstone. She said a lot more the following week when the Crown called her as a witness in Brown’s murder trial, and she testified against him.
Brown was duly found guilty.
Claims that she was ‘duped’
The sentencing date for the two of them was set down for May 25. Nine days before Tekotia was due to appear, she got rid of her defence lawyer Ina Stewart, engaged the services of Sharyn Green, and gave instructions that she wanted to vacate her guilty plea.
It was enough to excuse her from sentencing, and for a hearing to be set at the High Court on July 25.
I sat alone at the press bench. It was a strange day. There was Tekotia in her black tights and white dress, stepping into the witness box in white shoes with a square heel; Tyson Brown, too, had looked sharp during his trial, modelling a white shirt beneath a long black waist-length coat, like he was on his way to VIP seating at a nightclub.
Tekotia‘s lawyer, Sharyn Green, jangled and glistened in her two rings on each hand, bracelets, ear-rings and nose piercing.
Doe-eyed Crown prosecutor Luke Radich looked more melancholic than usual. Justice Johnstone, an outstanding prosecutor in his time, always in search of excellence and righteousness, leaned forward as though on the edge of his seat.
Tekotia was called to give evidence. But she wasn’t inside the courtroom, and Green asked the judge, “Does Your Honour want me to go out and get her?” He sighed, “Somebody has to.”
Tekotia duly appeared and told a story about the sorry state of her legal advice from Mātai Chambers. She had been “duped”, she said.
She was “pressured”, she said. She was not kept properly informed and neither was she made aware that she had a possible defence, she said.
In his cross-examination, Radich pointed to defence records that showed Tekotia was kept fully informed. He put to her, “You signed documents saying you would plead guilty.”
She replied, “I didn’t know what I was signing. I didn’t realise what it was.”
Murder defendant Tyson Brown appears in the High Court at Auckland, accused of having fatally beaten 2-year-old Arapera Fia in her Weymouth, South Auckland home in October 2021. Photo / Jason Oxenham
He held up a document, and said, “Can you see your signature?”
She replied, “Yes, sir, but I didn’t know that it was an instruction to plead guilty. It’s my mistake for not reading it. I just thought it was part of an affidavit.”
Radich has a gentle manner and is not quick to anger. He expressed his disbelief at her replies with a melancholy air.
Justice Johnstone cuts an action-packed figure in court, and suddenly took over proceedings. He asked her, “What affidavit?”
She replied, “I don’t remember.”
“But you signed and initialised it?”
“Yes.”
“Is this the first time you’ve seen the document?”
“I’ve never seen it before.”
“I don’t want to labour the point, but you must have seen it when you signed it.”
“I didn’t read it.”
“But,” he said, labouring the point, “it’s headed up, ‘Instructions as to plead guilty’. What did you think it was?”
She replied, “I don’t know.”
Didn’t notice bruises
He had enough. He handed questioning back to the doleful Radich, who explored one of the central issues of why she pleaded guilty: her inability to explain why she didn’t notice that her daughter was covered in bruises in the days leading up to her death. It would have been a key weakness in her defence and severely hampered her prospects of success at trial.
Certainly, it played badly for her in Tyson Brown’s trial. At one point the jury were shown a TikTok video that Tekotia had made of herself dancing, with Arapera standing passively in the background. Radich put to her that Arapera seemed to have bruises on her face and legs.
“I don’t accept that she had bruises on her legs,” she replied. “She always wore shorts, so it could be a tan line.”
A similar routine – Radich asking about the bruises, Tekotia saying she didn’t see any bruises – was heard at the July 25 hearing last year to vacate her plea. “You must have bathed Arapera multiple times,” he said.
“Yes,” she replied.
“You must have seen the bruises. Do you accept that?”
“I can’t accept that if I can’t remember seeing them.”
And so on. Her considerably more plausible defence was that she simply didn’t see Brown deliver the fatal beating.
Tyson Brown was charged with murder after the 2021 death of 2-year-old Arapera Fia.
In his trial, the Crown argued that he lashed out at the girl while Tekotia was taking a phone call from the Covid-19 health service advising her she had tested positive.
The call was made between 3.51pm and 4.21pm on October 31. She said in court at her vacated plea hearing, “I wasn’t in the room when it happened and I didn’t see anything. That’s my defence.”
It’s a good defence on account of the near-certainty that it’s true.
Even so, she was charged with failing to protect her child, and Tekotia’s refusal to see what other witnesses saw – visible bruising – would have damaged her credibility at trial.
It was almost beside the point that she hadn’t seen how her daughter was killed. The point was that in the days leading up to the murder she claimed she didn’t notice any bruising.
Felt rushed by former lawyer
She maintained she felt rushed by her former defence lawyer Ina Stewart from Mātai Chambers.
Stewart gave evidence at the July 25 hearing that she had in fact patiently and properly talked Tekotia through the guilty plea, and made her client fully aware of the process.
Strange to see a lawyer in the line of fire in a courtroom. Stewart sat nervously in the witness box, clasped her hands together until her knuckles were white, and gabbled on endlessly.
Quentin Duff, head of chambers at Mātai Chambers, was in court to wait his turn to give evidence; I asked him if Stewart always talked that much around the office, and he made light of it. And then he was called to give evidence, and was just about as jittery and verbose as her.
Never call a lawyer to the witness box. They seem so terribly vulnerable, the poor things.
If Tekotia had maintained her original plea of not guilty, and gone to trial alongside Tyson Brown, it would have been Stewart’s first experience as lead counsel in a homicide case. She wouldn’t have had very good materials to work with. Was there any kind of decent defence to the manslaughter charge?
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Stewart said in her cross-examination by the bejewelled Sharyn Green that she gave Tekotia various options to consider: “She had the option to continue to trial and give her, you know, evidence saying she didn’t see the bruises, and that was one of her options, but she equally could resolve and accept the charge on the basis that the bruises were there.”
There was also this exchange.
Stewart: “She told me she hasn’t seen the bruises.”
Green: “Correct, and that’s a defence, do you accept that?”
Stewart: “It, it’s, I don’t know, I mean is it a - it’s a possible defence, is it a reasonable defence?”
Not really, no.
Point of no return
To change a plea from not guilty to guilty is a piece of cake, welcomed by the judiciary and often rewarded with a swift but reduced punishment.
To change a plea from guilty to not guilty is like turning water into wine, only more difficult. It’s addressed in that seminal New Zealand handbook Adams on Criminal Law (a looseleaf edition is available on the Thomson Reuters site for $5,976 plus GST), which states, “Leave will seldom be given where the defendant has had competent and correct legal advice … Later regret over the entering of a guilty plea is not the test as to whether that plea can be impugned … Retraction will only be permitted in very rare circumstances.”
I put the matter to no less an authority than Chris Wilkinson-Smith, president of the New Zealand Criminal Bar Association. He was succinct. “When a defendant pleads guilty,” he said, “this is normally the point of no return.”
Nikitalove Tekotia had probably been at that exact point before, in more dismal and tragic circumstances, trapped in her home in Gibbons Rd, with a lover who didn’t want to be there and who she didn’t want to be with, both of them testing positive for Covid, both of them in isolation, a 2-year-old girl caught between them.
She was pushing a seriously heavy object uphill in her bid to vacate her plea. It never felt like it was going to happen at any time in her July 25 hearing.
A month later, on August 30, Justice Johnstone declined the application. The guilty plea remained in place and so did her conviction. Sentencing was set down for December 15.
But there was one last little twist. For the second time, Tekotia broke off relations with her lawyer, stopped communicating with Sharyn Green, and engaged the services of a third defence counsel, Emma Priest, who immediately asked for an adjournment of the December sentencing so she could brief herself on the case.
The Crown opposed it. Two family members were travelling from Samoa to attend the sentencing, and it would be close to a year from the offender’s guilty plea to when she was ultimately sentenced.
Judge exercised his mercy
The judge allowed it. A new date was set, leading to yesterday morning’s appearance at the High Court.
All that - the vacated plea, the hearing - for really no great purpose, in fact for scarcely any purpose at all.
Tekotia was never realistically going to achieve a not guilty verdict at trial and even less of a chance of the court accepting her application to vacate her plea. When she first pleaded guilty, Justice Johnstone signalled that imprisonment was “not inevitable”.
And so all it really achieved was that the judge waited another nine months to exercise his mercy, and give her home detention.
Courtroom six was packed yesterday morning. It was the final appointment in the long process of finding justice in the name of Arapera Fia.
It began with a bit of media housekeeping; Justice Johnstone ruled in favour of my application to publish his judgment on the vacated plea, and apologised for the grievous defamation of stating that I work for Stuff.
Malcolm Fia, Arapera’s dad and Nikitalove’s former partner, read out a witness impact report.
His left hand was heavily bandaged. He said he had worked as a machine operator but after Arapera’s death he started drinking heavily and lost his job.
He mentioned that Nikita had trespassed him from her property and told him if he came around she wouldn’t allow him to see his daughter.
He wished he had been there to save her and said to Nikita in court, without once looking at her, “You failed as a mother to protect our daughter. You put her in harm’s way.” She hadn’t looked up once when she entered the courtroom and sank her head lower, and wept louder.
“Prison is the only appropriate sentence,” said Crown prosecutor Luke Radich. He asked for a starting point of seven years.
He described her attempts to vacate her plea meant that although she claimed remorse for Arapera’s death, she did not accept criminal responsibility. Her version of remorse, he said, “is verging on an oxymoron”.
Emma Priest, and her assistant from Augusta Chambers, Pearl Wilks, had made good use of their time since December’s adjournment.
Nikitalove Tekotia appears in the High Court at Auckland to be sentenced for the manslaughter of her 2-year-old daughter, Arapera Fia, whom she failed to protect from abuse. Photo / Michael Craig
Their submission to Justice Johnstone gave a full picture of the life and miseries of Nikita Tekotia, put it in context, gave it depth – growing up in a culture of domestic abuse, an incident of sexual assault at 16, a psychiatric report which revealed a very high score of PTSD, and then “the perfect storm” of being trapped with Tyson Brown in isolation during lockdown, no way out, nowhere to go, “powerless”.
She had since completed programmes in family violence and alcohol counselling, had repaired relationships with her whānau, and was working with Oranga Tamariki and her church.
Home detention, said Priest, would allow Nikita an opportunity to break the cycle of inter-generational violence. Justice Johnstone agreed. His judgment was brave, surprising, beautiful.
She had suffered the murder of her child, he said. She had worn the punishment of being accused for three days in court that she was the murderer, he said.
She needed to go home, he said, and look after someone: Nikita had given birth since Arapera died, to a baby now aged 14 months, a daughter.