[1] He became a prominent criminal lawyer in New Zealand through his involvement in several high-profile trials, including the 1989 death of Peter Plumley-Walker, about which he published a book.
[1] In 1988, Harder was briefly detained in Fiji by the Rambuka regime after travelling there to represent eight Rotuman chiefs accused of sedition and five Fijian Indians charged following the discovery of a cache of Soviet-made weapons.
In 1989, the decomposing body of cricket umpire Peter Plumley-Walker was found floating in New Zealand's Huka Falls with its hands and feet bound, allegedly after a bondage session gone wrong.
[8] Teenage dominatrix Renee Chignell (then aged 18) and her boyfriend Neville Walker – the latter represented by Harder – were originally convicted of murder but were eventually acquitted in June 1991 after two retrials.
[3] In October 2016, it was announced that TVNZ was making a dramatization of the Peter Plumley-Walker case entitled Mistress, Mercy,[14] in which Harder was portrayed by actor Gavin Rutherford.