Justice for Peter Ellis - better late than never

This week brings a welcome decision from the Supreme Court, in a case that the NZ Skeptics have been

keenly interested in since the original court case in the 1990s.

I won't rehash the details of the case, as Craig wrote an article about it back in June, and there are some good articles online about the decision. But the news this week is that Peter Ellis has posthumously had his conviction quashed, and this decision, based on the argument that Ellis' mana needed to be restored, may have far-reaching implications for our legal system.

On the back of this decision, ex chair of the Skeptics Vicki Hyde emailed us this week. She reminded us of a letter she wrote back in 1998. The letter was a response to a member who had decided to leave our organisation because of a decision that had been made to donate to a legal fund for Peter Ellis. Here's the letter in full:

_We are sorry that the decision to donate to the Peter Ellis Defence Fund meant that you feel you can no longer support the Skeptics. The donation was made after considerable discussion at the AGM and, to my surprise, was agreed unanimously by those present.

If you will bear with me, I would like to explain the background of this and why it was germane to the Skeptics (in the same way that OJ Simpson or, indeed, your parking fine defence fund, would not be).

At the time of the Civic Creche case we were well aware of similar events in the US, following very similar patterns, and had even predicted that we would soon see in New Zealand a major child abuse case with claims of ritual Satanic abuse involving a day-care centre. We were very sorry to be proved right.

The case followed hard on the heels of ritual abuse “classes” being held in Christchurch where police and social workers (some of them later involved in the creche case) were taught that Satanic ritual abuse is a worldwide phenomenon (this despite the fact that protracted investigations in both the US and the UK have failed to find any evidence of such).

It was also during the depths of the recovered memory/false memory debate when increasing evidence was being presented on the malleability of memory and the ease with which it can be tampered with or modified in adults, let alone small children. Poor science and pseudo-science was being used to try to bolster the idea that memories are always true, and we even had doctors (obviously not parents!) declaring that children never lie.

When the Civic Creche case broke, the initial allegations seemed reasonable enough — we know, sadly, that child abuse does happen in our society, and we all share a responsibility to see that it does not occur and that, when it does, those involved are treated appropriately.

However, we were concerned to see an increasing number of allegations of various classic Satanic ritual abuse elements, including a number of truly bizarre or impossible events. These tended to be produced by the children of people with counselling backgrounds who had bought into the ritual abuse paradigm and who had questioned their toddlers over and over again about events at the creche. This included, as I understand it, the woman whose child made the first complaint and who was pivotal in organising other like-minded parents.

What really concerned us, as Skeptics, was the apparent unwillingness to consider the likelihood that mass cannibalistic rituals, child murder, the disinterment of Jesus Christ and other unsavory — and in some cases lengthy — activities could take place in an open-plan creche which was accessible at any time.

While some of the parents involved apparently still consider that these events did take place, the police were sufficiently concerned to weed out the more bizarre claims and present only the most believable. Selection of evidence to suit the desired aims is deplored in the sciences; it should be abhorred in the courtroom.

There are many other aspects of the case that we find questionable, but I think that the above action really strikes at the heart of the matter. How can we, as members of the public or, worse, as members of a jury, be expected to decide on a case if 80% of the evidence is not even presented because it is considered to be too unbelievable!

The analogy I have used is the following:

Imagine if I was a witness in the OJ Simpson trial and the jury were told that my statement said “I saw OJ Simpson kill his wife.”

Imagine that the full text of my statement read that “I was walking down the road after a couple of quick whiskies and a UFO picked me up and we went to visit Shirley Maclean and Elvis on Mars and then headed back to good ole Earth and I saw OJ Simpson kill his wife”.

I presume that you would agree with us that the earlier part of the statement has major implications for the credibility of the latter. We contend that the police should be required to reveal “the whole truth” as part of their responsibility to provide all the relevant information to a jury so that the latter can decide on guilt or innocence.

Sadly it appears that our justice system does not operate like that. Certainly I know that I now have major qualms concerning jury service — how will I ever know whether the police are concealing pertinent evidence in their desire to present a “good” case?

The Skeptics would not have made the donation to the Ellis fund were it not patently clear that an injustice had taken place. We did so realising that it would be a controversial decision but one that we could not, in all conscience, ignore were we to hold to our principles.

Thank you for your support in the past — we hope that you will reconsider your decision given the above.

Whatever you choose, we wish you all the best._

I think Vicki handled this really well, laying out the reasons why the committee had made the decision it did, and expressing regret at losing a member - rather than going on the offensive and acting combatively when faced with disagreement.

This is an issue we still occasionally face today in the NZ Skeptics; once in a while someone will email us to let us know that they're cancelling their membership, or unsubscribing from our newsletter, because of something we've written or a stance we've taken on a topic. Our usual position is that we're sad to see people go, but of course we're not likely to change our stance on a topic just because one of our members will leave us if we continue to hold that stance. If they're able to show that we've messed up and reached a bad conclusion, then I'd like to think we'd be able, as a committee, to revise our opinion - but if instead of a reasoned argument we just receive a resignation letter, I imagine that alone would be unlikely to sway us.

Recent issues that have caused a member to either cancel their membership or unsubscribe from the newsletter have included our acceptance of the science behind climate change, our unwillingness to publicly defend the Listener letter writers in the Mātauranga Māori debate, and my favourite - a newsletter recipient who wasn't happy with an article I'd written about how I was unsubscribing from my paid Spotify account. He thought my decision, based on Spotify's funding of misinformation peddler Joe Rogan, was an obvious instance of cancel culture, and his solution to this was to cancel his subscription to our newsletter.

So, if you're one of those people who we've upset in the past because the committee seems too “woke”, or that we're engaging in “cancel culture”, but yet you're still subscribed to this newsletter, I applaud you. Thank you for sticking around even when things don't always align with the way you see the world!