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Otago Daily Times
Tuesday,
18-November 1997
MP demands inquiry into Ellis case
Wanganui: The 1993 trial of Peter Ellis was
"an outrage to justice", New Zealand First MP Rana Waitai said in
Wanganui yesterday.
Ellis was found guilty of sexually abusing children at the Christchurch Civic
Childcare Centre between 1986 and 1992, and has served four years of a
10-year sentence at Christchurch's Paparua Prison.
But an article on TV3's 20/20 programme on Sunday night claimed that jurors
failed to reveal relationships with people involved in the case, and Ellis's
lawyer, Judith Ablett-Kerr, QC, plans to petition the Governor-General in an
effort to get a pardon for Ellis.
Mr Waitai, a former police superintendent, told the Wanganui Rotary Club
yesterday 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, chairman of Parliament's select committee on justice and law
reform, said that if half of what was on the programme was 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 and 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.
At the time of the Ellis trial, a new "politically correct"
attitude had arisen toward sexual abuse, he said, which "spawned . . . a
sexual abuse industry and that industry had certain tenets that were beyond
examination". - NZPA
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