"OTAGO DAILY TIMES"

Dunedin, New Zealand.

Wednesday, 12 December 2001.

Page 12.

OPINION

LETTERS to the EDITOR

Peter Ellis

PETER ELLIS and his female co-workers originally had some 100 allegations made against them. Mr Ellis was convicted of only seven, presumably under the "where there is smoke there is fire" principle. When approximately 90 allegations are made of events which did not happen, mostly because they could not have happened, it does not follow that the other seven allegations are true just because they could have happened. When the majority of the allegations are demonstrably untrue, surely this creates a reasonable doubt about the remainder, and this is where our adversarial justice system let Mr Ellis and the children down.

It may well be the case that evidence from the children whom Mr Ellis was not charged with abusing was not admissible under the rules of our current justice system but this is just the problem. If these children could be encouraged to make extreme and ridiculous allegations against Mr Ellis and his co-workers, does this not create a reasonable doubt against the evidence of the few charges on which Mr Ellis was convicted?

All of the trials, appeals and inquiries to date have merely concluded that the rules of our current system were applied to Mr Ellis' seven convictions. They have not examined the system itself to determine whether a fair trial was even possible.

To pardon Mr Ellis now is to find the system guilty, and I suspect that this is the reason for Justice Minister Phil Goff's reluctance to read Lynley Hood's book, A City Possessed .

R.E. Mawson [Abridged. - Ed.]

Mosgiel