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The Court of Appeal hearing into
the 1993 convictions for child abuse of Peter Ellis ended yesterday with a
strong plea that the court use wide discretion in deciding what evidence it
would consider as admissible. Giving her summary address, Ellis'
counsel Judith Ablett Kerr 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 . . . ," Mrs Ablett Kerr said. "And that seventh ground was
justice itself." 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". Simon France, for the crown,
argued that the risk of contamination of children's evidence was known and
investigated. The crown accepted that
inappropriate questioning by parents had taken place, but "it's not a
perfect world". Court president Sir Ivor
Richardson said the judges would take "a considerable time" to look
at the material. |
