Here's Hoping

A Great Proposal--If Reified 

One of the commitments made by the new Labour Government has our strong support.  It has made a commitment to establish a Criminal Cases Review Commission.  Now, ordinarily the prospect of the State establishing yet another commission, committee, review panel, or plaintive Greek chorus would fill us with mirthful Monty-Pythonesque sarcasm.  But not in this case.  

What is in view?  It has been the disturbing reality that far too many people have been convicted by courts, only to have their convictions be subsequently judged as "unsafe".  New Zealand is a small place, only slightly larger than your average village.  The judicial fraternity is even more tightly knit and matey.  A truly independent review of convictions is hard to come by.

Dr Jarrod Gilbert has done us all a service in his recent article in the NZ Herald.  He has reminded us of an unjustly convicted man named Peter Ellis.  Here is a summary of the affair:

Eighteen years ago this month, Peter Ellis left prison. He ought never to have been there in the first place.  Ellis, of course, was convicted of child abuse at the Christchurch Civic Crèche. It remains one of New Zealand's most controversial cases, and one that Labour and New Zealand First's proposed Criminal Cases Review Commission would do well to address.

If all the allegations were to be believed, Ellis was involved in making children dance naked while some were placed in an oven or suspended in a cage. Others were buried alive, and one child was forced to kill another. One unfortunate lad was turned into a frog and a cat. Needless to say the evidence for these events was not strong.  Because the allegations of abuse were so numerous, though, investigators concluded that many people must have been involved in the nefarious goings on.

In one police interview, when asked for the names of the men responsible, one child replied: "Spike, Boulderhead, Yuckhead and, um, and Stupidhead".  Yet Spike, Boulderhead, Yuckhead and Stupidhead remained at large while four female caregivers were arrested, although charges against them were eventually dropped. That left Peter Ellis to stand in the dock alone.  Convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, Ellis refused to attend parole hearings knowing he would have to confess to the crimes in order to argue for early release. Not on your nelly, he thought.  [NZ Herald]

There seems little doubt to our minds that Ellis's conviction rested in part upon the fact that he was and remains a homosexual.  His employment at a child's creche was  creepy on the surface of the matter.  But justice cannot rely upon such ephemeral suspicion.  A deeply disturbing thing to us about the Ellis case is that his (female) colleagues in the child centre were equally identified by the child-witnesses as part of the alleged terrible misdeeds at that centre.  But they all escaped prosecution.  Ellis alone was charged and went down for the "terrible crime".

At the same time there was a spate of similar cases in the United States and the United Kingdom which relied largely upon evidence given by children which was effectively coached out of them by adults.  Author Lynley Hood, in her book, A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case  left no doubt in readers' minds that the conviction of Ellis was most likely wrong.

But the justice system held together tighter than an All Black scrum.

In the 1980s, ideas of 'satanic ritual abuse' became rife in America as bizarre reports that Satanists were abducting and ritually murdering children spread across the country.  Before being dismissed as bogus and dubbed 'satanic panic' concerns around fantastic and elaborate child abuse came to New Zealand and settled on Peter Ellis, after a child said they had seen his "black penis".

As bad luck would have it, around that time a psychological dogma had become popular that suggested children never lie (a claim laid potentially false by the fact the little sods lie almost constantly).  Probing interview techniques were also developed — that have subsequently been discredited and banned — that were extremely good at getting children to talk to therapist investigators but equally good at encouraging fabricated stories.

Faulty psychology, a moral panic, and fantastic claims by kids were the ingredients for a case in Christchurch so bizarre it's now scarcely imaginable.  At the time, graffiti around Christchurch read "BELIEVE THE CHILDREN".

There was enough disquiet on the part of some in the justice system about the conviction of Ellis that led to the call for an independent Board of Review of convictions which were omitting an unpleasant odour.

Many of those who maintain the gravest concerns about the safety of Peter Ellis's convictions are a who's who of this country's criminal justice elite but one deserves special mention.  Former High Court judge Sir Thomas Thorp investigated the case in detail and was so concerned that he argued that New Zealand needed a Criminal Cases Review Commission; a means to help uncover miscarriages of justice.

Based on research he did in the UK, where such bodies exist, Sir Thomas concluded in 2005 that there would likely be 20 people in New Zealand's prisons at any one time who were wrongly convicted.

The "system" closed ranks and refused to expose itself to the possibility of miscarriages of justice.  Now, finally, the present government says it is going to do something about it.

 All of a sudden this thinking has changed. The new Government has agreed to establish a Criminal Cases Review Commission. Arguably, it stands to be the single most significant development in New Zealand's justice realm since the establishment of the Supreme Court in 2004.

Thus far the Government is showing signs of being big on talk, but execution and delivery is already ending up in the "too hard" basket and being put off to another day.  A Criminal Case Review Commission, we hope, will not be one of  the casualties.  Let's hope Peter Ellis will not be (conveniently) forgotten.   It remains a terrible stain on our society.

In addition there are lots of repercussions which need addressing also, such as how academics and "experts" could become so easily captured by the Salem Witches Syndrome.  At the moment, the testimony of these self-deceived crackpots is still officially accepted as reliable testimony and the witnesses are still regarded as credible.  Unfathomable.