"Sunday Star Times"
New Zealand
October 24, 1999
Page C4.
FOCUS
 
The Crimes that never were - Ellis is not guilty
by Frank Haden 
 

TWO things should happen without delay. The Prime Minister should set up a commission of inquiry into how the Peter Ellis disaster happened. Apart from the main consideration, justice, it would forestall the Satanic ritual abuse industry's next auto-da-fe.

As a smart politician, she will know she would gain thousands upon thousands of badly needed votes with the election only five weeks away. Including mine.

And Sir Michael Hardie Boys should exercise his vice-regal prerogative to pardon Peter before he is pushed out of jail in February.

The five judges of the Appeal Court got it wrong when they denied Peter his appeal against his transparently unjust conviction for crimes that were never committed. Their error was expected, almost inevitable, but it will be marked down as an almighty blunder for all that.

The judges had good grounds for ordering a retrial. Sir Michael, an eminent jurist, had taken the unusual step of sending the case back for a second appeal, on five grounds which he considered sufficient. Even the rancorous old Christchurch High Court trial judge, now hopefully expiating his sins in the hereafter in some pit invented by his church, probably has won a few centuries' remission because he admitted to his intimates shortly before he died that he was troubled by second

thoughts about the wisdom of the way lie conducted himself.

Those children were never tortured and hung up in cages, as was testified. They never had sticks shoved into their rectums and penises, as was testified. They didn't kill babies, especially Jesus, as was testified. They were never made to stand in a circle of adults, being kicked by men with guitars and by creche workers who lifted up their dresses and performed "all sorts of interesting tricks with their vaginas", as was testified.

They went into the record, though, in the transcripts of the videotapes which the judge refused to let the defence show to the jury on the ground that Peter hadn't been charged with doing those things. Of course he wasn't charged with doing those things. The Crown Law Office showed good sense in not charging him with killing Jesus.

But those accusations, straight out of children's nightmares, were inextricably involved with the things Peter was charged with doing. A central plank of his appeal was the fact that the judge withheld them from the jury. I have read the transcripts, so I am in a privileged position from which to condemn the travesty.

The children were aggressively interrogated by their parents, social workers and crusading interviewers, pelted with leading questions and manoeuvred into telling tales that grew in gruesome detail with every sentence. Then they were exploited for reasons of religion, political correctness and downright greed for the buckets of money pushed at them by Accident Compensation Corporation workers.

If it hadn't been Peter Ellis it would have been some other innocent in the wrong place at the wrong time, given the broad witch-hunting streak that shames the decent majority of the people of Christchurch. The city's zealots had been out in force before, don't forget - riding the storms of their own creation in previous cases of falsely recovered memory of child sex abuse.

The five judges considered they had to stay within the confines of justice, that mythical figure wearing a blindfold and holding the scales. But when the law has shown itself to be fallible, when its blinkered pursuit by foaming-at-the-mouth zealots, dim-witted parents, man-hating social workers and a religiously prejudiced old trial judge have created a miscarriage of justice, it is time to shoulder it aside and let reason have its turn.

The five judges have said, in effect, that the law is infallible. They say the conviction of Peter Ellis cannot be faulted because the strict legal steps have been taken. They say theirs is a legal forum, not a forum of common sense. The place for common sense to be invoked, they say, is a commission of inquiry. The implication is that a commission of inquiry might delve into things they must not look at, ponder thoughts they must judicially refrain from thinking. And consider the situation the way every sensible person in New Zealand is considering it.

A commission of inquiry might concern itself with the fact that no child ever went home stinking of urine after being subjected to "golden showers", a practice the five judges pointed out Peter had mentioned during one of his irresponsible bids to shock his colleagues in lunch-room conversations.

Such an inquiry might also delve into the fact that this urinating over children is supposed to have gone on in toilets that have no doors and are in full view of everyone walking or running around in a busy creche.

I have been there, and I know. I also know what any child would do if anyone peed over her. Or him.

There would have been no stopping the loud yells of protest, the tears, the rushing off to tell the world what had happened.