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The Daily News
February 19 2002.
Even Phil Goff will not be able to ignore Ellis case soon
Editorial
Peter Ellis served nearly seven years in jail, of a 10-year sentence, for
"crimes" that are about as valid as those that condemned
17th-century witches.
The Christchurch
creche worker was convicted in 1993 on 13 charges of abusing children in his
care. He has always maintained his innocence and insists that he will not
rest until his name has been cleared.
Despite current Justice Minister Phil Goff's squeamishness at even jabbing
the case with a stick, the legal machinery that rolled over Mr Ellis, causing
collateral damage to four innocent co-workers at the creche, might yet come
to his rescue.
The wide and long-standing public scepticism about the bizarre case has won
another significant supporter, the New Zealand Law Journal.
Editor Bernard Robertson alleges the police investigation of the gay Mr Ellis
was driven by an obsessive junior officer, the original High Court trial was
"conned" by psychiatrists, two Courts of Appeal hearings were too
selective in the evidence they reviewed, and the ministerial review was
wrongly directed or simply wrong.
On top of the meticulous research and astute criticisms in the recently
published tome, A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case,
by Dunedin scientist Lynley Hood, the quiet but steady campaign to absolve Mr
Ellis – and completely clear the names of creche supervisor Gaye Davidson,
and workers Marie Keys, the late Janice Buckingham and Deborah Gillespie – is
building to such heights that Mr Goff will be unable to ignore it much
longer.
Christchurch
specifically, and the country generally, was gripped by a moral panic in the
late 1980s.
Justice Minister Geoffrey Palmer was sufficiently alarmed by the then
globally fashionable feminist-lesbian ideology that he engineered late-night
legislation to facilitate improper and persistent interviews with child
"victims" and "witnesses", and the court's acceptance of
uncorroborated evidence.
Police could find no physical or scientific evidence of abuse, no photographs
or instruments, no adult eye-witnesses, none of the children's alleged
trapdoors, tunnels and cages – and no murdered boy called Andrew.
The pre-schoolers were hounded into statements by their hysterical parents,
the police, and predisposed counsellors and therapists. One key witness found
the courage to retract her story.
The poor little tykes' weird tales were sifted and sanitised by interviewers
and police – and then swallowed by a gullible court.
The case tore the community apart and destroyed lives, victims all of them –
both the falsely accused and the children, and their bewildered and pained
families.
It was a massive price to pay to advance a piece of flawed feminist dogma
that all men are rapists and that all such complainants must be believed.
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