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The Dominion
July 6, 1999
Child accusers pressured - Ellis lawyer
Allegations made by children against convicted
paedophile Peter Ellis became increasingly bizarre the more interviews they
were subjected to, the Court of Appeal was told yesterday.
Ellis was jailed for 10 years in 1993 after a jury found him guilty on six
counts of indecent assault, three of doing an indecent act, one of inducing
an indecent act, and three of sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection.
His appeal against conviction, which opened in Wellington yesterday, is being heard by the
full five-judge bench and is expected to take four days.
Opening her submissions, counsel Judith Ablett Kerr gave examples of children
being pressured by five or six interviews.
The stories had grown at each interview. In this way, by the fifth or sixth
interview, an allegation that Ellis had shown a child his penis had grown to
children having had to strip and dance naked, or been hung in a cage.
But when it got to trial, such allegations, though outlined strongly at
depositions, had been substantially watered down by the Crown, making them
appear more reasonable to the jury.
The jury had not been asked to find beyond reasonable doubt that children had
been strung up in a cage and had their private parts cut off, or that they
had needles inserted in them, Mrs Ablett Kerr said.
Instead of alleging actual sodomy, the Crown had framed that charge as
"an indecent assault by placing his penis against the child's
anus", she said.
The appeal, in the Christchurch Civic Creche case, argued miscarriage of
justice on six grounds.
These related to the techniques used to obtain evidence, the risks of
contamination of children's evidence, the retraction of children's evidence,
issues of trial procedure, issues to do with the jury, and the non-disclosure
of material to the defence.
Before an audience of Ellis's support network, Mrs Ablett Kerr argued there
had been a failure of the system to recognise where child evidence should
have been treated with "caution".
Expert advice suggested such caution "at the very least" was
essential in a case of a mass allegation at a day-care centre.
Not only had children's evidence been contaminated, but the jury had also
been ill-equipped to give a fair and balanced judgment because jurors did not
have all the necessary information to hand, she said. Some jury members had
had a predisposition to find him guilty.
Mrs Ablett Kerr said "networking" had occurred among mothers of
creche children, starting soon after a child had told his mother he
"hated Peter's black penis".
That boy had subsequently made no disclosures and played no part in the
trial. But what followed was contact between mothers as well as meetings of
"concern", and the setting up of a support organisation, she said.
"The network I'm talking about has been like a spider's web. I would put
(that mother) at the heart of the web."
As an example of parental contamination, Mrs Ablett Kerr said the mother of
another child had repeatedly insisted her child be re-interviewed after the
mother had elicited new information.
Another had gone as far as driving her child to a Hereford St address Ellis had once
lived at. The child subsequently disclosed the address as the site of circle
incidents and torture.
Another child had named 21 individuals as perpetrators, including "men
in white suits" and "groups of Asians at the Park Royal".
Bizarre allegations of ritual abuse included children being locked in cages,
being buried in the ground in boxes, injected with needles and having to
participate in mock marriages. Almost all of these allegations could be
identified in a list of "signs" of ritual abuse set down in a book
by a ritual abuse author, Pamela Hudson, Mrs Ablett Kerr said.
"With great respect, even allowing that paedophile rings exist, they
leave evidence behind them.
"There was no tangible evidence to support what these children were
saying . . .
"It may be that I'm being too suspicious, but it's an extraordinary
coincidence that mothers of four out of the six (whose evidence resulted in
the convictions) were engaged in counselling work or sex abuse therapy."
The appeal before Justices Thomas, Gault, Richardson, Henry and Tipping is
proceeding.
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