The National Business Review
June 27, 2003

Ellis case needs resolution
Editorial

During the whole of the 1970s, governments were paralysed by a miscarriage of justice. Convicted double murderer Arthur Allan Thomas was eventually pardoned in 1979 when Sir Robert Muldoon and Attorney-General Jim McLay lanced a running sore.

It would not have happened without a sustained campaign that started with a journalist, Pat Booth, and was followed by other books, including one by a well-known international author - all of which established that a murder conviction and a jail sentence were wrong.

While Mr Thomas keeps out of the public spotlight on a farm bought with his $1 million compensation, his case is still being written about and, in recent times, performed on stage. It was also turned into a film.

The parallels with the Peter Ellis child abuse case are obvious. He, too, has been supported by public opinion and the media with most of the ammunition coming from an award-winning book, A City Possessed, by Dunedin author Lynley Hood.

Now there is a high-profile petition calling for a royal commission. In a related move, this newspaper's publisher, Barry Colman, has offered a reward of $100,000 for any new evidence that can shift Justice Minister Phil Goff's stance that Ms Hood is covering old ground.

Even the most disinterested see Mr Goff's position is untenable. This because the book, and the reason a wide spectrum of leading New Zealanders have signed the petition (including Mr Colman but not this newspaper's editors for professional reasons), is convincing without the need for more evidence.

The Ellis case is not about the kind of tampering with evidence that sent Mr Thomas to jail. It is about how the judicial process was captured in an outbreak of hysteria fuelled by dubious psychiatry, dodgy journalism, a now discredited feminist agenda and medical professionals eager to milk an ACC honeypot.

It was helped, at the judicial level, by changes in evidence law and zealous police responding to rising public concern over genuine child abuse. Central to Ms Hood's case is that the events in Christchurch did not occur elsewhere in New Zealand but did elsewhere in the world where there was also such a meeting of circumstances.

No one named in the book (and there are many) have rebutted Ms Hood's case or sued her for defamation. Mr Goff's state of denial will not make the Ellis affair go away, any more than it did the Thomas case. In the end, a simple political decision is all that is needed.