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The
Christchurch Civic Creche Case |
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Before I write another
word, I am obliged to declare a personal interest in what follows. I was one
of those who signed the petition organised by Don Brash and Lynley Hood
calling for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the arrest, trial and
conviction of Peter Ellis in the Christchurch civic creche case. On Monday,
the Justice and Electoral Select Committee, to which the petition was
referred, released its report. While recommending a
number of worthwhile changes to the legal web in which the unfortunate Mr
Ellis became entangled, the petitioners’ request for a full and independent
investigation, conducted by a legal expert from outside New Zealand, was
declined. As a result, the catastrophic failure of our criminal justice
system, represented by the Ellis case, will endure unacknowledged,
unexamined, uncorrected, and unreproved. And unfortunate,
because miscarriages of justice on the scale of the Ellis case exert a
pernicious influence on every one of the institutions that they touch. Local
government, the police, social welfare, the courts, the judiciary and now
Parliament have all been tainted by their involvement. In every instance,
ignorance, fear, and the singular reluctance of institutional authorities to
ever admit to error, have combined to exacerbate and extend the original
injustice. The most alarming
aspect of this institutional infection is that the longer it is allowed to
continue, the higher it rises. What began as an expression of individual and
collective hysteria gradually morphed into the exercise of civic, police and,
ultimately, judicial power. At every stage, the application of scientific and
forensic rationality could have brought the whole manic process to an end. Sadly, a malign
confluence of individual obsession, ideological dogma, religious bigotry and
reckless careerism pushed the case forward to the point where a great many
reputations, both individual and institutional, had become inextricably bound
up with Ellis’s fate. The occasional local
aberration is, of course, unavoidable in even the best regulated of
administrative regimes. When a collection of highly motivated and likeminded
individuals suddenly coalesces into a crusading body of true believers,
dangerous eruptions of irrationality are difficult to avoid. In a properly
functioning society, however, these episodes are generally contained, and their
worst effects ameliorated, by the intervention of superintendent bodies. This is precisely what
happened in a number of overseas jurisdictions when senior police officials
and courts of appeal were confronted with the aberrant decisions of local law
enforcers and judicial officers. Separated in both time and space from the
overheated and often hysterical environments in which child abuse convictions
remarkably similar to Mr Ellis’s had been entered, these review agencies,
after closely scrutinising both the evidential and procedural elements of
each case, were moved to overturn the original judgements in nearly every
instance. That this did not
happen in New Zealand is as perplexing as it is alarming. In a manner highly
reminiscent of the Arthur Allan Thomas case of the 1970s, the New Zealand
Court of Appeal accepted the highly suspect trial evidence and upheld the
jury’s guilty verdict. It did this not once but twice. There is something
truly horrifying about this failure of our judicial system. Not only did it
condemn a man whose guilt was in more than reasonable doubt to 10 years in
prison, but it conferred upon Peter Ellis’s accusers an undeserved and
entirely spurious credibility. The groups responsible for the "witch
craze" that we know as the Christchurch Civic Creche child abuse
scandal: all those "ritual abuse" peddlers, "recovered memory"
counsellors, "all men are rapists" feminists, "children never
lie" social workers and "Satan is among us" Christian
fundamentalists, have never been called to account. I am sure that is why
so many prominent New Zealanders appended their signatures to the petition.
Surely, our elected representatives, when confronted with the evidence, would
act decisively to restore public confidence in the criminal justice system?
Surely the Labour Party’s sense of fair play would be equal to Rob Muldoon’s?
But here, too, we have been disappointed. Here, too, that curious
institutional unwillingness to admit error has prevailed. Though the select
committee’s recommendations indicate clearly that it recognises how badly the
system failed Peter Ellis, the political will to make that failure explicit
is lacking. Anacharsis, the ancient
Greek philosopher, recognised the difficulty. As he wryly acknowledged: "Laws
are like cobwebs, for if any trifling or powerless thing falls into them,
they hold it fast, but if a thing of any size falls into them it breaks the
mesh and escapes." Peter Ellis simply
isn’t big enough to exonerate. Chris Trotter is editor of the New Zealand
Political Review |
