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Radio NZ; MARY
WILSON - Back home the lawyer for
convicted pedophile Peter Ellis has written to the justice minister asking
for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the controversial case. Ellis served seven
years of a ten year prison term for molesting children at the Christchurch
Civic Creche and was released in 2000 still protesting his innocence. He has a
lot of supporters who have not been successful so far in arguing for a
Commission but his lawyer Judith Ablett Kerr says new research by an Otago
University professor shows just how flawed the child evidential interviews
were The Ministerial Inquiry conducted
by former Chief Justice Sir Thomas Eichelbaum seven years ago found the
interviews were carried out properly, but Mrs Ablett Kerr dismisses that. JUDITH
ABLETT KERR What we now know is that
that Ministerial Inquiry which was supposed to be the answer to the concerns
about the Ellis case. In fact it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny MARY
WILSON - It’s conclusions was that
the way the children were interviewed was appropriate. JUDITH
ABLETT KERR Yes MARY
WILSON - Your argument would be that
those evidential interviews with the children were too flawed to be reliable? JUDITH
ABLETT KERR Yes, and for that I rely
of course on the recent research of Professor Hayne. She says that contrary
to the conclusions that were drawn in the Eichelbaum report the interviews
did clearly ... and I’m quoting her now .... The interviews clearly did not meet
the standards of best practice in 1991 and they would not meet current
standards in 2006. The interviews were not conducted in accordance with
findings from decades of scientific research investigating the reliability of
children’s reports and in some instances failed to comply with even the most
fundamental guidelines. Now
that’s a pretty damning statement. In fairness to Professor Hayne, it’s a
very balanced research paper that she has produced and she says where things
have been very good, but she says that 14919 questions were asked in the
Ellis case of the children. This is
just the ones on tape. Only 11 of them. Only 11 out of 14919 questions were
coded as free recall - that’s the type of question that gets the most
reliable information from children. She goes onto say that, you know, there
were a certain percentage, a good percentage that were reasonably well
conducted, but she points out that there were a significant percentage of
questions that were capable of producing incorrect answers and false
allegations. MARY
WILSON - And given the number of
questions JUDITH
ABLETT KERR The number of questions
were in itself really brings into question of how reliable the whole of the
interviews could be MARY
WILSON - You can only imagine a lot of
very confused children JUDITH
ABLETT KERR She said fatigue must
have been a very big factor MARY
WILSON - So why didn’t the
Ministerial inquiry reach a similar finding? JUDITH
ABLETT KERR I think the difference is
this. One, it all depends who you go to (laugh). But the experts in the Ministerial inquiry
gave their opinion. What Professor Hayne has done is to provide an empirical
research paper. It’s a paper based on science. It’s not opinion. It’s a
scientific result And this is the
first time in the Ellis case of course that we’ve actually had a scientific
result MARY
WILSON - And that you think is enough
for this government to say yes to a Royal Commission of Inquiry JUDITH
ABLETT KERR Well, not on it’s own,
it’s not. I will obviously put that
into the petition to go to London to the Privy Council, but if you couple
with that the recent research papers done by a man named Ross Francis. They
were published towards the end of last year in the NZ Law Journal, and they
talked about the Eichelbaum inquiry and the kind of advice Justice Eichelbaum
received. It was a search for how he came up with the experts that he did
come up with. Because certainly one of the experts that he came up with could
never be described as well known and in fact had a very clear position on
interviewing of children and what was legitinmate and was not legitimate and
I think there had been some difficulty in relation to a case that she had
been involved in, in Canada, over techniques of child interviewing. MARY
WILSON - There has been publicity
about that JUDITH
ABLETT KERR Yes there has, and so
There have been lots of concerns and I don’t want to go into all the concerns
that Mr Francis has identified but there are enough concerns about the
inquiry and the integrity of the inquiry to raise ... I was going to ask the
Minister to speak with me anyway about it, but when I added on top of that
the research that Harlene Hayne has came up with, which contradicts the
conclusion of the Ministerial Inquiry, it seems to me that those people who
have been asking for a Royal Commission of Inquiry are exactly right. That’s
exactly what should take place MARY
WILSON - Any response yet from the
Minister? JUDITH
ABLETT KERR No, and in fairness it
only went to her last week so I’ve got to give her time to read the letter
but the call for the Royal Commission of Inquiry was of course spear headed
by the research of Professor Hayne,
I’ll also point out to the Minister all the things that were
absolutely unfair about the trial process itself. When I have been thinking
as I have for quite some time about the Ellis case ..If we go to London to
the Privy Council, we’ve got a strong case.
If we win, which I expect that we would then at the end of the day
we’re still going to have to have a commission of inquiry of some kind,
because a Privy Council appeal will not answer the questions about what
happened at the Christchurch Civic Creche and how on earth we got into this
situation MARY
WILSON - That’s lawyer Judith Ablett
Kerr. She is the lawyer for Peter Ellis. |
