The body set up to examine miscarriage of justice complaints has still not finished a single investigation after two years of operation.
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But Te Kāhui, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), said it was getting close, with the first case expected to be referred back to the appeal courts within the next six months.
One person who knew all too well how a wrongful conviction could affect a family was Geoff Hall - his brother Alan battled for 37 years to clear his name of a murder conviction, and spent 19 years in prison.
Once the Hall family got investigators on board, it still took four years to get Alan's case back before the court - so Geoff Hall said the commission's time frame, while it may seem long, made sense.
"Two years is not a long time, but also two years is a huge amount of time," he said.
"In the early days for us, when Alan was first arrested and then held on remand, that remand period from April to September for trial was a huge amount of time. Every day was so painful."
The commission got just over 300 applications in the two years since it began - it had disposed of about a third, with about 200 still in the review and initial assessment phases.
Sixteen cases were being formally investigated, and it was hoped a couple of these could be referred to an appeal court in the next six months.
Lead investigator Tim McKinnel, who had been involved with Alan Hall and other high profile cases, said while the commission could not disclose information about individual applications, these were situations where there may have been a miscarriage of justice and more investigation was needed.
Te Kāhui lead investigator Tim McKinnel. Photo: RNZ / Tess McClure
"Half of them are homicide cases," he said.
"We've got a small number of sexual violence applications, there's a couple related to drug offending, and the other major area is serious violence."
While two years might seem like a long time without any referrals, McKinnel said the timing was in line with what was expected when the commission was created.
The commission also had the authority to make recommendations about systemic issues, and hoped to do this within a year.
Tim McKinnel said it was already identifying trends, including poor identification and interviewing methods, which were factors in the wrongful conviction of Teina Pora.
He was just 17 when Susan Burdett was raped and murdered in her Papatoetoe home in 1992. Pora spent two decades in prison before his conviction was quashed in 2015.
"And then there are the broader issues, in the US they call them Brady violations," McKinnel said.
"People are raising issues with us around whether information that related to their case was properly disclosed to them in advance of their trial or appeal."
Criminal justice researcher Jarrod Gilbert said this could be the commission's biggest hurdle - getting agencies to open up files and share what they find.
"We've seen a very, very clear pattern in the past that when concerns around cases have been raised, people clam up because they think that admitting error will in some way undermine the criminal justice system. I would argue the reverse is true."
Gilbert said the delays were unsurprising given the complexity of the cases, but said it was likely even the commission would like to be further ahead than it was.
For the Hall family, the CCRC would have been a "godsend", if it existed earlier.
Geoff Hall said no family could take on the system alone.
"The way it's set up, it's just so difficult for an individual or a family member to keep a case going on their own. It just can't be done."
He remained confident that once it got going, the Criminal Cases Review Commission would be a much-needed backstop to prevent further miscarriages of justice.
