The Court of Appeal has rejected a legal bid by convicted double murderer Mark Lundy.
The ruling says his appeal should be dismissed on the basis no substantial miscarriage of justice has actually occurred.
Lundy has twice been convicted of killing his wife, Christine, 38 and daughter, Amber, 7. Their bludgeoned bodies were found at their family home in Palmerston North in August 2000.
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He was convicted of their murders in 2002. After the Privy Council overturned his convictions in 2013, he was found guilty for a second time at his retrial in 2015.
On Tuesday, The Court of Appeal rejected all but one of the grounds of Lundy's appeal.
Stains on Lundy's shirt were a point of debate in both his trials and the appeal. The Crown said the stains showed brain or spinal cord matter from Christine was on Lundy's shirt. The defence argued it could have been food.
The Court decided the scientific evidence the Crown relied on, RNA similar to DNA, was inadmissible.
Yet Lundy's appeal was still dismissed as it was found there was no significant miscarriage of justice.
Lundy's challenge to the admissibility of the immunohistochemistry (IHC) evidence, advanced by the Crown to establish the presence of central nervous system (CNS) tissue on two stains on Lundy's shirt, was rejected.
All experts called at the retrial agreed the IHC results showed the tissue was CNS tissue.
His lawyers also argued in the appeal there were significant omissions from the Judge's summing up at the first trial, and the retrial was an abuse of process because of substantial changes to the Crown case compared to the first trial.
The Court of Appeal was satisfied his trial was fair and there was no breach to the right to a fair trial.
His life imprisonment with a minimum term of 20 years will continue.
Newshub.
