“SUNDAY
STAR-TIMES”
New Zealand
Sunday,
September 30, 2001.
Front Page.
BOOK SPARKS
CALL TO PARDON ELLIS
Donna Chisholm
AN AUTHOR who has spent seven years
researching the Peter Ellis case has called for the government to pardon Ellis
and set up a commission of inquiry into the criminal justice system.
Lynley Hood's book A City Possessed, on the Christchurch
Civic Creche case which saw Ellis sentenced to 10 years' jail in 1993 for
sexually abusing seven children concludes he was the victim of a city's moral
panic.
She says her investigation gave her
"shock after shock" as she realised the scale of the flaws in the
criminal justice system - and the flimsiness of the prosecution case.
Her 600-page book, to be published
tomorrow, builds a compelling picture of Ellis' innocence, against a backdrop
of a burgeoning sex abuse industry which saw untrained and unsupervised
counsellors diagnosing abuse on dubious grounds at the taxpayers' expense and a
feminist movement hijacked by the all-men-are-rapists cabal.
Hood also says changes to the
Evidence Act in the late 1980s contributed to a judicial environment which made
it easier to convict suspected molesters without reliable evidence.
"The main change was the expert
evidence provisions that allow all sorts of psychobabble which wouldn't be
admissible in any other court case. It should be for the jury to decide who to
believe in these cases."
The lesson of the creche case
"and the one that has been put in the too-hard basket" is that the
criminal justice system cannot distinguish between true and false allegations
of child sexual abuse, she says.
"I'm not saying it [abuse]
doesn't happen. All I'm saying is there is no epidemic and never has been - but
there's a huge, largely unrecognised, problem of false allegations that
desperately needs to be addressed."
While she hoped her book would lead
to a pardon, that would not solve the system's problems and a full commission
of inquiry was needed into the criminal justice system.
"There is every potential for
another creche case.”
Hood's book suggests at least one
person in authority during the creche case is having doubts about how the
investigation was handled.
Former Children and Young Persons'
Service general manager Robin Wilson told Hood social welfare was the first
government agency to give women a significant role in management.
"I opened the doors to women
and got flattened against the wall as they charged through. You look back and
think; was it all good?"
A lot of social welfare interviewers
were connected with the women's movement and at least one “had her own agenda.”
“At the time, I didn’t see that as a
problem. Now I don't know. Looking back, I'm not sure who was running the show.
That's why I worry about our role in the creche case. Were our interviewers
detached and objective? I know it's been said that if they didn't create the
problem they certainly gave it a good stir along."
Hood also documents the apparent
mindset of police.
One mother of a creche child told
Hood she asked one officer during the inquiry if Ellis was guilty.
"I don't remember whether he
said 'in my opinion' or whether he just said it. But he said 'Yes, he's guilty,
and we're going to get him.’ ”
Ellis told the Star-Times yesterday he had not seen Hood's book but had nothing to
fear. The outcome would depend on the public reaction.
He said he was not "bitter and
twisted" but the legacy of the creche case was that men were afraid to
have contact with children.
He was not working other than as
"a fulltime housekeeper and gardener" at home with his mother.
"I have been living with this
for 10 years now and judging by [the latest publicity] I am not going to be
tomorrow's fish and chip paper for another six months at least."
Hood, who met Ellis in Paparua
prison in 1995, said she found him "very engaging.” The impressive thing
to me was that there was this guy with the eyeliner poncing around amongst all
these shaven headed tattooed thugs and really acting as shop steward for the
lads."
What convinced the inmates he was
innocent? "I haven't asked them."
A ministerial inquiry by former
chief justice Sir Thomas Eichelbaum earlier this year found Ellis had failed by
a "distinct margin" to prove his convictions were unsafe.