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Kim Dotcom wanted his day in court. No. He needed his day in court. The wrongness of the raid had eaten away at him from the moment the helicopters landed. It had never come right and it needed to come right. There had been early injustices. In an apparently inexplicable moment of incompetence, the Crown Law Office had used the wrong legal order to seize his fortune. The seizure was meant to have come after a hearing — not without one. There was, at least for that day, judgment due to Dotcom, he felt.

Then there were questions over the search warrant. How did it become such a dramatic, over-blown affair? What were New Zealand's elite police counter-terrorist unit doing in an airborne assault for what was by some definitions a copyright case? It was this question which had captured Paul Davison QC's attention from the beginning. He says it was the one stark detail which raised questions about every aspect of the operation — why the dramatic assault from above by automatic weapon-toting police?

Months after the January raid, Dotcom's day in court came. The hearing in August had been won by challenging the legality of the search warrant used.

Chief judge Helen Winkelmann called out the January 20 blitzkrieg as excessive and wrong in law. On June 28 2012, she ruled the raid unlawful and the search warrants illegal. It meant that not only would Dotcom have his day in court, but to his satisfaction there would also

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