Judge tells jury to put emotions aside as four teens face trial for Kyle Whorrall killing

A judge is preparing jury members to decide the verdicts of four teens on trial for the murder of American student Kyle Whorrall.

Whorrall was killed at a bus stop in Auckland's Meadowbank on 19 April 2025.

Four teens pleaded not guilty to the killing and have been on trial at the High Court in Auckland for the past three weeks.

A fifth teenager earlier pleaded guilty to murder and aggravated robbery.

Summing up the case, Justice Simon Mount warned jurors not to lump the teens together.

"There are four defendants in the trial and you need to look at each of them separately," he said.

"Some of the evidence is relevant to all four defendants, for example the evidence of the eyewitness, [and] the CCTV evidence of the movements of the car. But it is important to emphasise that other evidence is admissible only against specific defendants."

Each defendant faced two charges: murder and aggravated robbery, but jurors also had the option to find them guilty of manslaughter or robbery.

"So for each of the two charges, there are three possible verdicts," Mount said.

He urged each of the jurors to set their emotions aside.

"It would be perfectly natural to have a reaction to the events of 19 April [2025] and the serious injuries inflicted on Mr Whorrall. You may also have felt some sympathy for the defendants because of their age," he said.

"You need to put any feelings like that to one side and look at the evidence dispassionately."

The credibility and reliability of witnesses was also a concern, Mount said.

"A witness can be honest and sincere, but wrong or inaccurate. They might have misunderstood what they saw or heard," he explained.

"A possible and obvious example is the eyewitness who thought the victim was female, when clearly, they were mistaken about that. He had a relatively brief view from a moving car, and there was poor lighting."

But that didn't mean jurors should dismiss all of his evidence.

"On the other hand, key parts of his evidence are corroborated by the objective facts. We know that Mr Whorrall was confronted and killed, we know from [the fifth teen's] convictions that there was a robbery and a murder."

Another witness, the stepfather of the teen represented by Paul Borich KC, had "described himself as a compulsive liar, and 'New Zealand's biggest liar'," Mount said.

"Plainly, you will approach [his] evidence very cautiously when deciding whether to accept his evidence and how much weight, if any, to give it."

Mount said the stepfather's unreliability had even been accepted by the prosecution, who had called him as a witness in the first place.

"The Crown accepted he is generally neither credible nor reliable; Mr Steele (the Crown prosecutor) described him as an admitted compulsive, habitual liar with numerous dishonesty convictions," Mount said.

He said jurors would need to decide whether witnesses had any reason or motive to give false evidence.

"In [the stepfather's] case there was a strong attack on his credibility because of at least two reasons: firstly to get more favourable treatment with police, he was on a final bail warning at risk of being charged for perjury and for additional shoplifting charges," he said.

"And secondly, based on his anger at [his stepson] and a motive to take [him] out of the picture."

Jurors would have a lot to consider while weighing the Crown's case, which was mostly circumstantial.

But just because most of the evidence was circumstantial, that didn't mean the case was weak, Mount said.

"Any one strand of the rope may not support a particular weight, but the combined strands may be strong enough to do so," he said.

"[But] a strand of evidence that forms part of the rope for one defendant may not form part of it for another."