Peter Ellis loses race to clear name
Christchurch man’s cancer death comes as Supreme Court prepares to weigh appeal
ADunedin writer and a former University of Otago academic involved in research on the Peter Ellis creche sex case say a Supreme Court appeal needs to go ahead, despite the 61-year-old’s death yesterday.
His lawyer, Rob Harrison, said Ellis, who had bladder cancer, died peacefully among family and friends.
The childcare worker was released from prison in 2000 after serving seven years of a 10-year sentence for abusing seven children at the Christchurch Civic Childcare Centre in 1991.
He had been convicted, after a trial in the High Court at Christchurch in 1993, of 16 counts of sexual offending against the children in his care.
Ellis maintained his innocence and was fighting to clear his name.
The verdicts have always been contentious, and in July, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case once more. Whether it will go ahead or not appears to be up in the air.
A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said yesterday that would be a matter for the court to consider in terms of any submissions that might be made on the issue.
Harrison said he wanted to talk with Ellis’ family before commenting publicly on options for the case.
Lynley Hood, whose 2001 book, A City Possessed, criticised the convictions as “a witch-hunt” and the result of mass hysteria, said she knew Ellis was terminally ill and time was running out quickly this week, but his death still came as a shock.
She said it was terribly sad Ellis did not survive to see his name cleared and hoped the case would proceed.
“It’s really important it be heard because it has been such a major concern for nearly 20 years.
“When you have such widespread public misgiving the justice system may have failed it undermines public confidence and if you can’t have public confidence in the justice system we are all in trouble,” Hood said.
“We have to be able to trust our justice system to get it right.”
A team of University of Otago staff, including vice-chancellor Harlene Hayne, as well as former law school dean Mark Henaghan, did research to get the appeal to the Supreme Court.
Henaghan said yesterday the case, which was set down for November 11, needed to go ahead as any rulings would influence “lots of other cases”.
“It is a matter of quite considerable public importance as to how we go about these sort of cases.”
The basis of the appeal was the
“unreliability” of evidence admitted to the court by an “expert” psychiatrist and the children themselves.
“Cases such as this case, where you’ve got evidence from young children, are really important cases.
“There are quite a few lessons to learn as to whether we can do it better, and how it was done in this case,” Henaghan said.
Ellis twice appealed to the Court of Appeal, the second time after a referral by the Governor-General.
The first appeal quashed three of his convictions, but the second appeal against the remaining 13 convictions was dismissed in 1999.
After the second Court of Appeal decision there was a Ministerial Inquiry in 2001 by Sir Thomas Eichelbaum, which concluded there was no risk of a miscarriage of justice.
There have also been unsuccessful petitions to Parliament for a Royal Commission in 2003, 2008 and 2014.
When asked in an interview last month about the complexity of the evidence against him, Ellis said witnesses didn’t “quite get it right”.
“It’s something that probably innately we all know as human beings that children are children and adults are adults, and we can all make mistakes,” he said.
Ellis was brought to tears when he spoke of living with the convictions for all of these years, but he chose to focus on the positives.
“I have friends I never knew I had and expert witnesses that turned up; people who read Lynley Hood’s book . . . and other people who have . . . had their own life experiences and suddenly realised, ‘oh, Peter Ellis has been through something similar’.
“The North Canterbury community have looked after me. It’s been 19 years since I have been out of jail and I can walk through my community and the children there call out to me.
“They have actually known me and they trust in what they see.”
When you have such widespread public misgiving the justice system may have failed it undermines public confidence. Lynley Hood, author