“THE LISTENER”
New Zealand
Editorial – Bruce Ansley
WHIFFS OF
INJUSTICE
When
the top US lawyer of last resort, the Harvard Law School's Professor Alan
Dershowitz, visited New Zealand he told me about a troubling aspect of his
work: he dealt in sleaze.
He
thought it necessary. The more unsavoury the characters, the more the state
took liberties with their rights. So Dershowitz ("a sort of judicial St
Jude", Time magazine called him) fought at the rough end, for what
happened there would sooner or later affect everyone.
His
observation fits the Peter Ellis case very well. A convicted paedophile is so
odious that his cause is tainted. Why, asks justice Minister Phil Goff, doesn't
everyone just let it go?
Of
course, if Ellis is not a paedophile, the injustice is so much worse: as well
as being wrongly convicted, he is also branded with one of society's most
contemptible crimes.
The
government would rather not face that possibility. It hopes the matter will go
away. After all, injustice seems not as great when Ellis is no longer banged up
in Paparua Prison, but lulled to sleep each night by the sound of surf at his
little house near the beach. After a decade, though, clearly it isn't going
away.
Peter
Ellis did seven years for abusing children at the Christchurch Civic Creche. He
has been free since February last year. Millions of words have now been written
about identical mass-allegation cases around the world (most now discredited),
the climate of hysteria in Christchurch, the scares peddled by an international
abuse industry at the tine, the deficiencies of his trial, the bizarre and
often ridiculous stories told against Ellis by children. Lynley Hood, the
Dunedin author, has now added several hundred thousand in her book A City
Possessed.
A
whole series of official inquiries has changed the outcome not a jot. The High
Court found him guilty. Since then Ellis's case has figured in two Court of
Appeal hearings, three petitions to the Governor-General and two separate
inquiries by High Court judges.
After
the last such inquiry, by former Chief Justice Sir Thomas Eichelbaum earlier
this year, Goff cried enough. Goff, like Eichelbaum, declared himself convinced
that Ellis had been convicted properly.
Well,
you might have some sympathy with the minister, especially, if you were a
parent. The children said to have been abused by Ellis - a very small number in
the end - are all teenagers at least. This bleak, unending case must have
blighted their childhoods.
But
the sum of those inquiries hardly adds up to the confidence claimed by Goff. At
one Court of Appeal hearing one of the children said she had lied in her
allegations against Ellis. Critics always suspected that children had reacted
to pressure from parents and social workers. At the other, the Court of Appeal
suggested a commission of inquiry. One High Court judge found the case against
Ellis tatty enough for it to be referred back to the Court of Appeal. Only
Eichelbaum was unambivalent, and Ellis's lawyers always considered his terms of
reference far too narrow to give their complaints a fair hearing. The sequence
smells of manipulation, and has only succeeded in making the Ellis case a
running sore.
Now,
Hood's huge book is raising what dust has been able to settle. She found the
case against Ellis unconvincing. Her book has been received in a way that shows
- although it hardly needs to be shown again - the sense of unease over this
case. The book has lengthened the already long list of critics. Eminent lawyers
and academics have expressed their doubts in reviews all over the country,
effectively making the Ellis crusade an Establishment cause.
It
would be nice to declare the whole thing over, as Goff has tried to do. But it
is not. The play so far has only made the dilemma worse. A retreat would be a
huge loss of face for police, courts and the government, who all now have a
vested interest in Ellis's guilt. But injustice is corrosive. It lingers. Only
a public inquiry can resolve it now.