The Herald
June 28 2003
Goff right to reject petition on Ellis
Editorial
A book
challenging the conviction of Peter Ellis on charges of child abuse in a
Christchurch creche has made a powerful impression on those who read it. They
include an impressive list of prominent people, published in the Herald on
Wednesday, who have put their names to a petition for a commission of inquiry
into the Ellis case.
So far Justice Minister Phil Goff has been unmoved. "Judicial decisions
are made by people with the skill and experience to do so," he said.
"They are not made by politicians, authors or notable people."
Actually, there are several lawyers and even a retired High Court judge,
Justice Laurence Greig, on the list too. But the minister has a point and it is
this:
A book, no matter how well researched and compelling its conclusions, is
ultimately one person's version of events. A criminal trial is a different kind
of inquiry. With her book, A City Possessed, Lynley Hood has reflected a
widespread view that Ellis may have been the victim of a cause.
Nobody needs to have read the book to share an impression that social workers
and police, in their determination to prosecute child abuse, sometimes seem too
credulous where the claims of children are concerned. Their rule of thumb has
seemed to be that children have no reason to make things up, and that if some
of their stories seemed fanciful there had to be a trigger for the child's
imagination. Once an investigator suspected abuse, no line of questioning of
the child seemed too suggestive or prejudicial.
But once a case is brought to court, leading questions can be challenged and
prejudicial assumptions excluded. Much of the concern over the Ellis case
arises by all accounts from evidence of children that was excluded because it
was simply not credible. Ellis' supporters argue that had the jury heard it,
the rest of the children's evidence would have been received in a different
light.
Lawyers, no less than authors, select the evidence they present for its value to
the case they are making. Defence counsel are
particularly selective, doing their utmost to exclude any adverse information
about the defendant that is not necessary to a bare description of events
giving rise to the charge. In this way, juries are often denied background
knowledge that most people would consider relevant to a judgment of guilt but
which the law considered prejudicial. Prosecuting authorities are supposed to
be more even-handed in laying out their evidence, presenting what they have gathered
whether or not it supports their case.
In that respect a good book will resemble a prosecution case. In fact a good
way of assessing the author's reliability is to note whether inconvenient
comments and facts occur in the account. A book built entirely on a defence
case would be a tendentious document indeed. But no matter how balanced a book
may be, it needs to come to a clear, convincing and
preferably upsetting conclusion to warrant publication. And no matter how
balanced its case, it is one person's construction.
A courtroom, by contrast, is a testing arena for conflicting versions of
events, aimed at convincing a dispassionate judge or 12 anonymous citizens who
have no personal interest riding on their conclusion. For that reason, the
Justice Minister is right to resist an inquiry into a case that has been judged
in courtrooms several times now. He needs to see new evidence before he could
consider reopening the case. Plainly he has not seen it in the book.
He is not impressed by the list of luminaries who have lent their names to the
cause. Their views carry no more weight than those of any other citizens. Like
us all, they know only what they have read.