Sunday, 25 November, 2001.
Auckland, New Zealand.
Nationwide Distribution.
Page A2.
NATIONAL NEWS
LEGAL CALLS GROW FOR ELLIS REVIEW
By DONNA CHISHOLM
Legal muscle is gathering behind author Lynley Hood's bid to
put the Peter Ellis case back on the political agenda.
Hood's A City Possessed on the Christchurch Civic Creche
investigation provides a compelling case for Ellis' innocence of the child
sexual abuse charges for which he spent seven years in jail.
But a spokesman for Justice Minister Phil Goff has said Goff
is unlikely to read the book and remains satisfied with the conclusions of
former chief justice Sir Thomas Eichelbaum that Ellis had failed to prove his
convictions were unsafe.
Hood accuses Goff of moral cowardice and having a closed
mind - and senior lawyers who have read the book back her call for political
action both on the Ellis case and the flaws in the criminal justice system
which allowed it to happen.
Otago University law faculty professor and dean Mark
Henaghan said he planned to gather all the reviews of A City Possessed - most
by senior lawyers and academics - and send them to Goff asking him to act.
"I will suggest more needs to be done," he said.
The book demanded a response and exposed cracks in the system which others
could fall into if nothing was done.
Henaghan said he had always felt the pendulum had swung too
far in child sexual abuse cases, for example the suspension of warnings to
juries about the need for careful scrutiny of children's evidence and allowing
experts to say a child's behaviour was consistent with sexual abuse when
nothing was inconsistent with it.
He had concerns about whether Ellis received a fair trial
and a commission of inquiry into how the criminal justice system handled child
sex abuse was one way of examining the problems.
Palmerston North Queen's Counsel Mike Behrens said A City
Possessed changed him from being a supporter of the adversarial justice system
to one who saw grave faults in it.
While his gut feeling before was that Ellis was innocent,
"the horror deepened" when he read the book.
The pressure was off the government, he said, because Ellis
was an unpopular cause. "Who wants to align themselves with Ellis? Arthur
Allan Thomas was your good keen Kiwi boy and good political fodder; a vote
catcher. One would like to hope people would look at the case and say the
evidence is this person is innocent but it doesn't work like that.
"Is it scandalous that an innocent man remains convicted?
Of course it is. It is in the too-hard basket."
Canterbury University senior law lecturer Cynthia Hawes said
she would like to see the government pardon Ellis. The legal avenues appeared
exhausted.
"Apart from people who are deeply involved in the case,
I would say everyone accepts he is innocent."
NZ Law Journal editor Bernard Robertson said the book raised
questions about the legal system which had to be answered - all the judicial
inquiries into the Ellis case suffered from limitations which destroyed their
usefulness.
Auckland University associate law professor Bill Hodge was
convinced moral panic spread from the parents of the Christchurch Civic Creche
children to those who would ultimately prosecute and convict Ellis.
"Political pressure is the only avenue left in a
democracy when the orthodox legal channels for criminal appeals have been
exhausted as they have been in this case."
Said Hood: "Everyone is saying this is a really
important book and the government can't ignore it. The systemic problems are
wider than Ellis."