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The Southland Times
July 23, 2002
A case worth revisiting
Peter Ellis is either one of the most prolific serial child
sex offenders in New
Zealand history or one of its most
unfortunate scapegoats, a victim of a Salem-style witch-hunt. Either way his
case warrants a Royal Commission investigation.
Only a full public hearing conducted with authority and expertise can lay to
rest a continuing level of public unease about the fairness of the trial he
received and the sentence he has already served.
Ellis, it is true, has already had his days in court -- and plenty of them.
He was sentenced to 10 years' jail after his conviction on 13 charges of
abusing children in his care at the Christchurch Civic Crèche. He
served his time, constantly maintaining his innocence, while his
representatives tried, fruitlessly, to have him released. They even took the
matter to the Governor-General, to no avail.
It is not simply enough that someone who protests innocence ardently enough,
or has a sufficiently persistent body of supporters, should be afforded a
Royal Commission. Such inquiries are expensive, time consuming, often
maddeningly complex and, in cases such as this, they hold the potential to
scour victims' wounds once again.
It would be extravagant and indulgent to hold a commission of inquiry into a
matter of idle historical interest. A larger issue of public good needs to be
at stake and in this case it is. The credibility of the legal system, as it
worked in this case, and as it may work in others, needs to be either upheld
or exposed as faulty.
That said, it must quickly be acknowledged that the momentum of the debate
has not been entirely in Ellis' favour. Christchurch
police want to speak to him about fresh allegations of sexual abuse, dating
back to his time at the civic crèche. On the other hand, the case was
examined closely in Dunedin
author Lynley Hood's provocative book A City Possessed, which claims Ellis
was the victim of a combination of hysterical over-sensitivity to the
potential for child abuse from a homosexual man working among children, altogether
dodgy child-interviewing practices and systemic flaws in the justice system.
The fact that the book has recently won New Zealand's premier non-fiction
literary award may have added some impetus to his campaign, but that should
be largely irrelevant. Book judges do not, generally, trump High Court
judges, and neither should they. Hood's argument, however, has proven
troubling enough that even those who ardently maintain the man to be guilty
cannot deny the subsidence of public confidence in the matter. If anything,
they may be tempted to welcome an inquiry, if only because it holds the
potential to strip from Ellis the martyr's mantle which he now wears, rightly
or wrongly, in the eyes of so many.
It is perhaps part of the New
Zealand psyche that some cases engage
public interest to the extent that we continue to worry them long after the
event -- most famously in the case of Arthur Allan Thomas.
In that case the result was a pardon and the payment of compensation. It is
perhaps also worth noting that the Thomas case gained helpful impetus from
the release of the David Yallop book Beyond Reasonable Doubt.
The Ellis case needs finality, as well as certainty: finality because, as it
stands, he could be under investigation for child sex abuse time and time
again as more supposed repressed abuse is brought to light during therapy;
and certainty because so much of the more incredible supposed evidence
against him in the original case was never put before the jury.
Much of the disquiet about this case is that the evidence was selective. A
Royal Commission examining all of the allegations is the only way to bring
this sorry saga to a close.
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