Peter Ellis

This past week has seen an appeal of the Peter Ellis child sex abuse case being heard in the Supreme Court.

The Peter Ellis case revolved around supposed ritual abuse of children at the Christchurch Civic Creche. He, along with a number of his co-workers were accused of various shocking acts against the children in their care. However, only Ellis's case went to trial.

The NZ Skeptics had quite a bit to say about the original case. Lynley Hood wrote “A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case”, Jarrod Gilbert wrote an excellent article about the case, and NZ Skeptics committee member Jonathan Harper has written extensively on the case when it was reviewed in the Eichelbaum Report in 2006.

Peter Ellis unfortunately died in 2019 of bladder cancer, but the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal on the basis of Tikanga Māori, meaning that his mana should extend beyond his death.

The appeal, set down for two weeks, started this week and Jonathan Harper has been attending, and reports in his own words:

“Peter Ellis was convicted of sexual abuse as a Childcare worker in Christchurch rather a long time ago.

The evidence against him came from children whose evidence had been seriously contaminated by parents, social workers, therapists and experts who frankly probably knew better than to take the evidence too seriously during a Satanic Ritual Abuse public panic.

There were no spontaneous uncoached allegations. Many allegations against Ellis and several of his colleagues were bizarre and very unlikely, if not impossible. But the prosecution had hidden most of this from the jury, and focused on presenting the few credible allegations. Both expert witnesses were psychiatrists, and did not help clarify the real issues. At the current hearing the information is much more coherent as all six experts are psychologists.

Lynley Hood's massively detailed tome, A CITY POSSESSED is an excellent detailed account for anyone wishing to get more of the social background and history.

There are many excellent current media reports if you just google Peter Ellis Supreme Court; especially those by Martin Van Beynen who followed the original trial.

I have been attending the present hearings all week with Ross Francis. They wrap up at the end of next week.

My impressions so far:

The three expert witnesses for the prosecution are, in my opinion, rather poor scientists who appear to be making excuses for the extremely poor forensic interviews and contamination of evidence through parental, police and social workers' suggestions before the trial.

All six experts do seem to be in agreement that the interviews were very poorly conducted. The defence experts (especially Harlene Hayne) are adamant all this made the convictions unreliable. The prosecution ones equally adamant that while there were serious errors, that doesn't mean the evidence was not strong enough.

It is pretty difficult to follow their arguments because they seem to start from the idea or assumption that Ellis was guilty. That is fair enough, but the opposite scenario seems rather foreign to them. For example, very few prosecutions, and even credible allegations resulted from the more than one hundred children interviewed. I always figured the small percentage is about what you get when you do experiments to see which children are susceptible to making false statements when false scenarios are presented to them by parents, police, social workers, etc…or anyone really. But no, Gail Goodman claimed those were somehow the ones resistant to suggestion and telling the truth. I still can't quite follow the logic of that. Another witness for the prosecution, Fred Seymour in their space of about five minutes gave us the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy”, plus two more and a classic confirmation bias.“

We should hope that the conviction of Peter Ellis is righted as it seems to be a clear case of injustice.