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The
Sunday Star Times
August 10, 2003
Ellis case our Salem witch hunt
Letter to the Editor
by Peter Williams, QC, Auckland
In a society where the rights of the underdog are less and less respected, it
is refreshing and perhaps even comforting that millionaire publisher Barry
Colman should take up cudgels on behalf of Peter Ellis (August 3), wrongly
convicted of child sexual abuse.
The published testimonies of witnesses clearly reveal a pattern of childish,
bizarre, unreliable fantasies similar to the evidence in the Salem witch trials that caused 19 convicted
"witches" to be hanged and many other suspects persecuted in Massachusetts in 1692.
The great English libertarian John Stuart Mill published his famous essay on
liberty in 1859, which included the following words: "But indeed the
dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant
falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into
commonplaces but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances
of truth put down by persecution."
We should remember that Arthur Allan Thomas, although innocent of the murders
of the Crewes, was convicted twice of those offences by juries.
Surely the only two questions now are where did our judicial machine go wrong
in the Ellis case and how much compensation should be paid to him?
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