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The
Dominion
November 18, 1997
Trial an outrage, says former police officer
NZPA
The 1993 trial of Peter Ellis was "an outrage to justice", former
police superintendent Rana Waitai said in Wanganui yesterday.
Mr Waitai, a NZ First MP, told Wanganui Rotary that there should be a
high-level inquiry or a royal commission into the trial, as Ellis could be
the victim of "an almost unbelievably bizarre abortion of justice".
Mr Waitai, the chairman of Parliament's justice and law reform committee,
said: "If half of what was on the (20/20) programme is true, Peter Ellis
must immediately be released and hugely compensated for the devastation that
has been done to his life.
"The normal rules of evidence appear to have been suspended. The normal
rules of investigation appear to have been suspended.
"Had the full claims (regarding ritual abuse), by the children been put
to the jury, they may have had a better insight into the claims. That the
jury was denied this is an outrage to justice.
"And most damning of all we learned from the detective-in-charge (that)
not only had a witness recanted their claim, but probably all seven of the
final witnesses had also by now recanted their claim."
Another aspect of the trial that disturbed him was that no medical evidence
or corroboration was sought by the police or prosecution.
At the time of the Ellis trial, a new "politically correct"
attitude had arisen toward sexual abuse, he said. "This spawned what one
could describe as a sexual abuse industry and that industry had certain
tenets that were beyond examination.
"The first was: a child who complains of sexual molestation never lies,
never mistakes the nature of what they're talking about and must be believed
totally.
"The second tenet . . . was that all men are rapists and if they had not
yet been caught it was just that they hadn't."
At the same time, ritual abuse claims were made about several harmless
organisations merely because they had elements of rituals in the way they
operated.
And the same people who made sexual abuse claims with such ferocity were also
connected with ritual abuse claims, he said.
"The children who claimed sexual molestation also claimed Peter Ellis
had cooked kittens and a whole series of other bizarre ritual abuse.
"What was put forward was a sanitised version. Anyone with a passing
familiarity with the law will know that is not good justice."
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