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Giving her summary address,
Ellis's counsel, Judith Ablett Kerr, QC, urged the five-judge appeal bench to
take a "liberal approach". "Because it's important that
justice be seen to be done and that's what this court is really about, about
justice," she said. "I understand the rules, that
(evidence before the court) can get out of hand ... but this is a highly
unusual case." She urged the judges to go even
beyond the six grounds that Governor-General Sir Michael Hardie Boys had
given for allowing the second appeal. "In fact there was a seventh
ground, and there always is in my submission," Mrs Ablett Kerr said.
"And that seventh ground was justice itself." Closing the hearing, court
president Sir Ivor Richardson said the judges would take "a considerable
time" to carefully consider the material before it, and would deliver
its judgment "in due course". Earlier, concluding the Crown
case, Simon France argued that the risk of contamination of children's
evidence was known and investigated. The context in which the material
had been gathered was appreciated at the trial, and it could be demonstrated
that its significance had not been underestimated, he said. The Crown accepted that
inappropriate questioning by parents had taken place, but "it's not a
perfect world". Addressing the research put
forward by the defence, as providing new insights into mass allegations, he
said: "There must be something new and significantly new, one would
expect, before one revisits jury decisions, and a decision of the Court of
Appeal on the same issue." The jury had been aware of
children's evidence, including of trapdoors, coffins, putting in ovens and
mazes, "all those things". He also put it to the court that a
juror associated through her partner to a complainant child's mother had not talked
improperly, and that evidence of a witness to a juror's proclaiming her
belief in Ellis's guilt, had been rebutted. Of a Crown failure to disclose
material, he said: "Any non- disclosure is regretted" -- but none
of such material had been significant. In her reply address, Mrs Ablett
Kerr faced lengthy questioning from the bench on the "newness" of
research into mass allegations that would warrant a fresh look at the Ellis
case decisions. She said the court had to recognise that the "fundamental
ground" behind the Governor-General's referral of the case to appeal had
been that "there may have been a miscarriage of justice". |
