|
|
The
|
|
Members
of the Parole Board should be called to account for their wildly illogical
double standards. They repeatedly set the sex-crazed killer Peter
Howse free to prey on harmless women, yet require an innocent man, Peter
Ellis, to tell lies and say he's guilty of molesting small children before
they'll release him. The
board defends its catastrophic misjudgements in the case of Howse by saying
weakly it "tries to be as vigilant as possible" but is hampered by
limitations on the information it receives. This
was not so with Howse - everyone knew plenty about him, including the
policeman who arrested Howse in 1991, charge him with kidnapping and
vigorously opposed any attempt to have him paroled. In
the case of Ellis, the board again has no lack of information. Hundreds
of thousands of words have been written about He is
still enduring a 10-year sentence, imposed by Justice Williamson, now dead,
in a miscarriage of justice that mirrored contemporary travesties in other
parts of the world. Ellis
refused to attend his first parole hearing in March last year when he found
the board would require him to accept conditions of release tagged as
"necessary for the safety of society." He
knows he has never done anything to endanger any part of society, and
justifiably asks why he should in effect perjure himself to win release by
saying he was guilty of the trumped-up charges. He
would be walking the streets free now if he had been willing to tell the big
lie the Parole Board demanded. On
May 31 the Court of Appeal is due to hear a rarely granted second appeal
against his sentence. And Justice Minister Tony Ryall says he
expects to give his formal advice to the Governor-General on Ellis's petition
before that date. What
has made the Ellis case internationally significant is the way the expertly
coached testimony of small children about their recollection of their lives
years previously was railroaded through the High Court. The
macabre trail was triggered by an outbreak of satanic ritual abuse hysteria
in Legal
observers were astonished that Justice Williamson excluded 22 out of 44 tapes
of video testimony by the children. The
22 tapes the jurors never heard contained bizarre and obviously untrue claims
such as being defecated and urinated on, buried, penetrated by sticks, hung up
in cages and subjected to satanic ritual abuse by Ellis and four women who
worked with him at the creche. The
women were accused of dancing in circles around the children and, among other
strange acts, lifting up their dresses and doing "clever tricks" with
their genitals. These
totally false tales, thanks to Justice Williamson, never reached the ears of
the jurors, though they are enthusiastically documented in the transcripts of
the tapes. The
children, three of whom had social worker mothers and had been thoroughly
indoctrinated by other social workers in exhaustive session aimed at getting
them to "disclose", ran amok with the most astonishing airy tales
about things that obviously could never have occurred. The
satanic ritual abuse hysteria had got to the social workers, the police, the
prosecutors, the judge an finally the jurors - who if they had been allowed
to hear all the tapes would have thrown out the charges in short order. The
international history of satanic ritual abuse persecutions is littered with
similarities, naturally, with each succeeding accusation building on its
predecessors. Perhaps
the strongest common link, after the strange belief children always tell the
truth, is the list of "satanic indicators" of abuse :
bedwetting, nightmares, fear of monster and ghosts and a preoccupation with
faeces, urine and flatulence. Get a
child who exhibits these "indicators", closet him with a social
worker and in no time at all you have another Peter Ellis wrongfully accused. The
Parole Board could compensate a little for its Peter Howse blunders by doing
the right thing for Peter Ellis : free him without delay, and without
conditions. |
