A new body to investigate wrongful convictions is about to begin its work. Mike White looks at why it's taken so long to establish a Criminal Cases Review Commission, and why some are concerned about its makeup.

Shaun Allen will be there. Mark Lundy will arrive not long after. Scott Watson may well turn up later. And they'll be joined by hundreds of others who believe they've been wrongfully convicted and are applying to the new Criminal Cases Review Commission to have their cases investigated, when it opens next month.

Three of the four men accused of murdering a fellow inmate at New Zealand's only maximum security prison can today be named.

The group appeared this morning in the High Court at Auckland in person and via video link, all charged with murdering Blake John Lee, who died at Auckland Prison in Paremoremo on March 5.

The man who killed teenager Eli Holtz​ after the youth shot at him with a water pistol in central Auckland is appealing his seven year jail sentence.

Myron Robert Alf Felise​ was jailed in February 2019 after pleading guilty to one charge of manslaughter.

At the High Court at Auckland, Justice Gerard van Bohemen sentenced him to seven years in jail and he was ordered to serve at least half of the sentence.

On Monday at the Court of Appeal, Emma Priest appealed Felise's sentence in front of Justice Forrie Miller, Justice Simon Moore and Justice Robert Dobson.

When a drunk man staggered onto Auckland's Queen St shortly before dawn on Saturday, April 20, last year, a car stopped and words were exchanged.

What might have ended with the drunk walking off and a car driving away instead left Jerico Telea​ dead and Joseph Antonio Halaholo Larson charged with manslaughter.

But Larson, 21, will spend no time in prison, after the the High Court at Auckland heard the catastrophic burst of violence also sparked a journey of forgiveness.

A 21-year-old man who admitted assaulting two young men at a Young Labour summer camp is appealing a judge's ruling not to grant him permanent name suppression.

The man was originally charged with five counts of indecent assault against four complainants, which he denied, after the 2018 incident.

However, he pleaded guilty to two amended charges of assault halfway through the trial.

He was discharged without conviction in November, but Judge Russell Collins did not grant him permanent name suppression.

A young father at "chronic risk" of self-harming took his own life while under compulsory mental health care after a series of failures by health staff.

He is the fourth mental health patient to die while under compulsory care at Waitematā District Health Board in just two years, including two suspected suicides within days of each other at a North Shore unit last May.

And while the board acknowledges failings, it says changes have been implemented to improve patient safety and prevent further tragedies.

The man's grieving mother, Margaret Lees, is now racked with guilt, having admitted her son to West Auckland's Waiatarau acute mental health unit because she feared he was suicidal, and believing he would be safe.

Lees' lawyer has suggested laying a police complaint to determine if staff at the facility could face criminal charges of neglect.

A Northland police officer who had no legal authority to stop a man from checking his dogs was punched twice in the face.

The violence Nathan John Theobald perpetrated in a forestry block in Dargaville resulted in him being sentenced to nine months in jail but since he's served a significant amount of time in custody, he won't spend any time in prison.

A week-long jury trial started in the Whangārei District Court after he pleaded not guilty to one charge of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

However, he then pleaded guilty to an amended charge of injuring with intent to injure and waived his right to a pre-sentence report.

A 21-year-old man who admitted assaulting two young men at a Young Labour summer camp has been discharged without conviction. 

The young man was originally charged with five counts of indecent assault against four complainants, which he denied. 

However, during his trial in September, the Crown withdrew the indecent assault charges, amending them to assault, withdrew a third charge and offered no evidence on the remaining two charges. 

A bartender has admitted to killing a man in an attack over Easter weekend.

Jerico Telea, 24, was critically injured in an assault on Queen St in central Auckland about 4.20am on Easter Saturday. 

He died at Auckland City Hospital two days later.

Fallout from the Labour Party summer camp case continues as the lawyers involved in the trial are at odds over the details.

The prosecutor in the Labour Party summer camp trial says the Crown does not accept there was no sexual offending, despite taking a downgraded plea deal to resolve the case.

The partner at the law firm Meredith Connell, which holds the prosecution warrant for Auckland, added "the correct position" was that the Crown "did not consider it necessary in the public interest for the jury to resolve the point".

He said the defendant's plea offer came during the evidence of the second male complainant.

"It necessarily involved the defendant recognising that the touching of the two males did happen largely in the way the Crown alleged, but disputing that the defendant knew either that touching was indecent or of the circumstances that made it indecent," Johnstone said.

"And it necessarily involved the Crown accepting that if guilty pleas were entered to assaults on the two males, there was insufficient public interest in continuing the prosecution. No more than that."