Inquisition 21
 |
 |
|
|
| Log In
|
|
|
|
|
| Search Articles
|
|
|
|
|
| Comments
|
|
|
You don't have to,
but if you log in,
you can add comments.
|
| Page Referral
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Country by country
|
|
|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
A country by country report on the progress of the sex abuse Inquisition
Lynley Hood
The Peter Ellis story
Scroll down for 'Fresh breeze from New Zealand'.
The shocking Peter Ellis story can be read in full on the web site of his New Zealand support group.
What we will deal with here are the remarkable similarities with the Canadian Saskatoon case, half a world away from New Zealand. The support group carries an interesting account of how the satanic abuse obsession reached the Antipodes from the US and other English speaking countries of the West, carried by politically correct zealots. It found fertile soil in New Zealand and Australia and was soon fanned into a brush fire.
As with the Canadian Saskatoon story, the Peter Ellis story, while perhaps the most striking and informative, is just one of many.
Let us look at some of the many examples of the NZ events mirroring those in Canada.
An unorthodox person, whose lifestyle and social attitude are judged to be socially deviant, or not politically correct, Peter Ellis, is chosen as the target of hatred and branded as a child abuser. His very popularity with the children in the child care center where he worked in the Civic Creche, Christchurch, in 1991, is used against him.
One of the mothers of the attending children is a counselor, a founder member of START, a private sexual abuse therapy organization which emphasized always ‘believing the child’ and to work to ‘unlock all the pain, bad memories and feelings’ of sexual abuse. She also identified herself as a victim of childhood sexual abuse. In November 1991, her son told her that he did not like ‘Peter's black penis’, although Peter is a white man. Later he admitted that his remark was ‘only a story’, but, like everything else in this case, once begun the bandwagon was unstoppable. The mother contacted other parents and the campaign began.
All the children are interviewed. While first none make ‘disclosures’, under continued interrogation and prompting, the disclosures begin, quickly becoming numerous and bizarre, and spreading to accusations against other adults, including women care workers.
Soon the satanic ritual abuse is revealed, typically involve consuming urine and excrement, penetrating body orifices with fingers, objects and penises, ‘sex rings’, child pornography, cages and dungeons, animal and human sacrifice, and even killing babies and eating them.
Officials from the Social Welfare department, a Social Welfare psychologist, Sue Sidey, and the police become involved. Note how in Canada also that the main instigators of the drama were two women therapists, one at a foster home, and one working for the state.
In March 1992, 34-year-old Peter Ellis was charged with indecently assaulting a child in his care. By the following October, these charges had grown to 45 counts of indecent assault, involving 20 children aged between two and six years old.
In October 1992 also, four women creche workers were arrested and charged with indecent assault. The claims now included that Ellis had peed into their faces, they were hung from the ceiling in cages, taken to a private home, forced to spend time in a tunnel under the house, made stand naked inside a circle of adults, including three of the women. No cages or tunnels were ever found and no dead babies. As in Canada where the police claimed that women were being used as ‘brood mares’ to produce babies for sacrifice, similar claims about mothers for rent were made in NZ. Ironically, some of his women co-workers had complained about his politically incorrect behavior in evidence against him and now the poisonous defamation had embraced them also.
When they were on bail, the media frenzy made life dangerous for them. In November 1992, four men went to Ellis' home and threatened to kill him. They beat him about the head with a wooden baton, one of them later being sentenced to six months imprisonment for assault. He explained that he knew that Ellis was guilty and it was his ‘civic duty’ to kill him. Graffiti was posted proclaiming the women's guilt. Some of them received bullets with their names engraved on them.
As the cases against some of the women began to crumble, and children recanted, it was suggested in the newspapers that some children’s parents had ‘backed out’ of the case. This was very similar to the Canadian authorities excusing collapsing cases by claiming a need to protect the children, thus ensuring the continuing social shaming of innocent people. Even when in March 1993, a High Court judge dismissed the remaining charges against the women, he did so for these three reasons:
1. The evidence was of insufficient weight to justify their trial;
2. The potential for prejudice against the accused was so strong that they might have been convicted for the wrong reason;
3. That the unavoidable delay in their trial on this charge may have resulted in hardship to the then seven year old child X who would have had to wait until the other trial of Ellis was completed. (X was the source of most of the satanic ritual abuse nonsense).
This was hardly a judgement that cleared the forever-damaged names of the innocent women.
Ellis was tried before a jury in May 1993, and denied all 25 charges. As in Canada, much evidence, which would have revealed the fantastic nature of some of the allegations, was suppressed, with the prosecutors relying heavily on staged videotaped disclosures. The court heard that Ellis was bisexual, that he often indulged in outrageous and provocative sexual talk designed to shock his fellow workers, that he was a flamboyant man who enjoyed teasing and playing tricks on both adults and children. A ‘psychologist counselor expert witness’ claimed that such behavior had all the hallmarks of his being a sex offender and should have alerted the creche management.
After a six-week trial, the jury believed the children and found Ellis guilty of 16 of the 25 allegations, despite the fact that one of the witnesses was the child whose evidence had led to the women's arrest but had been considered insufficient to convict them. Ellis was sentenced to 10 years in jail, and was placed in the maximum-security wing of Paparua prison.
Amongst the suppressed evidence were the following revelations: Ellis had put children in steaming ovens. He had pulled off a little boy's penis with pliers, had killed young boys with axes, and had squashed children in doorways until they vomited. One girl said that creche women had put a knife in her vagina, while a boy talked of insertions into his penis. A little boy who had made claims, later dismissed, about ritual circles and creche women dancing naked around them, and whose other evidence resulted in Ellis' conviction, also claimed that two creche workers had made him kill another child, and that the dead child was then buried in a box in the ground.
The case cost millions, the creche was shut down, and later the children involved suffered a variety of psychological and behavioral problems, including excessive fearfulness and nightmares. In the Canadian case, Justice Baynton found that the therapists and the police had done all the damage to the children. In Christchurch, over one hundred families have had their lives disrupted, while close friends were split into two enemy camps of ‘believers of the children’ and supporters of the accused. Many competent childcare workers gave up their jobs, vowing to never risk working with children again. In Canada, great damage was done to fostering by the Saskatoon case as families feared more false accusations from foster children, who would be believed by the authorities.
What did the New Zealand jury of three men and nine women accept as true? They accepted that Ellis had urinated on two children, made one masturbate him, put his penis in the mouths of three of them, engaged in indecent touching of three and put his penis or an unknown associate's penis against the vagina or anus of three of them.
The trial judge, Justice Williamson allowed the jury to hear evidence of Ellis's flamboyant personality, his heavy drinking and his delight in shocking his women co-workers by talking about sex practices such as peeing on one's partner, and in his summing up, he called such practices ‘kinky’ and emphasized the prosecution's claim that they were similar to what Ellis was charged with doing to the children. He said to Ellis, “The jury disbelieved you. They believed the children and I agree with that assessment.'
The ‘Believe the children’ dogma was central to the Ellis conviction. In December 2003, in Canada, Justice Baynton attacked this false doctrine, which had jailed innocent people in the Saskatoon case.
What is wrong in New Zealand?
While the required standard of proof in New Zealand criminal cases is that of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, with the onus on the prosecution to prove guilt, as in so many places elsewhere, special changes apply in the case of sex abuse charges, and New Zealand juries are now allowed to convict alleged child molesters on the uncorroborated word of young children, even if the ‘allegations’ arise during coaching or playing with the ridiculous looking ‘anatomically correct dolls’, with their obvious penises, vaginas and anuses. If the child plays with these genitalia, the case for the accused is hopeless. This is gross injustice – indeed infamy.
The evidence of the children is interpreted for juries by psychiatrists and the Social Welfare staff who produce their videotaped productions.
As in Canada, in Christchurch in addition to the mother counselor, we have an official psychiatrist, Karen Zelas, Social Welfare staff, a policeman, and a Crown prosecutor, Brent Stanaway, hell bent on getting a conviction.
Stanaway succeeded in stopping the defense revealing such bizarre disclosures as that children were suspended in cages from rafters with lighted papers stuck into their backsides. The defense lawyer believed that such tapes cast reasonable doubt on the more credible testimony, even claiming that this was the crux of the defense case. But Justice Williamson refused him this right. Later Court of Appeal judge, Sir Maurice Casey, upholding Williamson’s ruling, said: “He was clearly right in seeking to prevent the trial becoming enmeshed in all the collateral and peripheral matters covered in the tapes not relied on by the Crown and about exposing the jury to the playing of many hours of irrelevant material, thereby distracting them from consideration of the real issues.”
In Canada Justice Baynton has now severely criticized the way a judge handled the original trial in the Saskatoon case. If a judge is infected by moral absolutism, forget justice. We saw it in the original inquisitions, and in Nazi Germany, and we are still seeing it. In Ireland a judge jailed an innocent nun for gang rape on the word of two women false accusers. Only a stroke of good fortune revealing former similar deceits of the accusers later saved her from life imprisonment.
The New Zealand psychologist, Karen Zelas, described as ‘a veteran expert witness in numerous abuse cases’ claimed that virtually any behavior exhibited by a child was consistent with sexual abuse. Later even when the child who was the Crown's prime witness retracted the accusation, the Court of Appeal insisted that a retraction is merely ‘denial’, with Sir Maurice Casey writing, "We are by no means satisfied she did lie at the interviews, although she may now genuinely believe she did."
Stirring the satanic abuse pot, where we had a university chaplain in Canada organizing the Saskatoon witch hunt, in New Zealand, this original role may have been best replicated by a Wellington abuse counselor, Anne-Marie Stapp, who operated through an organization called the Ritual Action Group, of which policeman, Laurie Gabites, was also a member. Stapp also gave workshops on satanic ritual abuse. Notice how in Saskatoon also, the leading policeman sat in on seminars with the women therapists.
Seventeen days after policeman Laurie Gabities alleged in theSunday News that Satanism, linked to child pornography, was rampant in New Zealand, the first complaint about Peter Ellis was made.
The culture in Christchurch
In a later article about the scandal, former creche worker, Stephanie Hauiti, remarked about the creche parents, “There were no plumbers or truck drivers there.” This is very revealing, as we learn that most of the center’s parents were middle-class parents shared the ‘liberal values’ that are defined by political correctness. The very liberal middle class that has produced our absolutist society, and engendered witch hunts. They are stuck in what we describe elsewhere on this web site at Stage Two thinking, the stage of unquestioned doctrines and dogmas.
As in the Canadian case, a key early meeting on November 28 1991 at the creche was attended by policeman Colin Eade, and Sue Sidey, the Social Welfare psychologist who later conducted most of the 127 child interviews. In Canada in 1991 also, a policeman, and a therapist sat down together at meetings, and a snowball began to roll. The Christchurch snowball started when the trio at the meeting decided to call a meeting of all current parents to explain what was happening.
Just like the Thompson mother therapist in Canada, the mother who made the first allegations in Christchurch was later described as ‘a virtual telephone exchange of information, real and imagined’ about what Ellis and the others had done in the creche. In the 17th century, Alonso de Salazar remarked, “I have observed that there were neither witches nor bewitched in a village until they were talked and written about.” In his fine book, Erotic InnocenceJames Kincaid, speaking about child abuse and in particular the obsession with child porn, tells us that in our society we make up stories. Unfortunately in an inquisition driven society stories are very dangerous for some of us.
A final observation about the events in Canada and Christchurch is the part played by publicly funded agencies, in both instilling a witch hunt mentality and carrying out the prosecutions. While the prosecutors were all sitting in comfortable jobs, paid for by the state, the unfortunate defendants were in near poverty, in some cases depending on lazy, incompetent defense lawyers, who probably also believed them guilty.
The most important development in support of justice for Peter Ellis is Lynley Hood’s book A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case.Longacre, Dunedin, 2001. As we are trying to do on this web site, she shows how such a case could happen, and why, demonstrating that the social and legal processes by which his conviction was obtained, and is being stubbornly upheld, has implications for all our liberties and for justice and our society. Her book won a number of awards. It has been reported that The Minister of Justice has said that he refuses to read it.
Lynley Hood was threatened with arrest for refusing to reveal the source and content of information received in the course of her research. The court gave her two days to hand over a tape they believed that she has recorded. She asked her legal advisers what they would do if she refused, and they replied, “Send you to jail!” In her book, she describes how she packed her bag and what she put in it, including a large copybook in which she would write a children's story 'Grandma Goes To Jail'. (A City Possessed p595-596.)
Now there is a Parliamentary Select Committee investigating the possibility of setting up a Royal Commission largely as a result of Lynley Hood's book and a petition organised by her and two MPs.
Let us close with psychiatrist Dr Karen Zelas. She gave evidence for the crown, advised the police, trained and supervised the interviewers, was counselor to some of the witnesses and advised the judge on how to question child witnesses. When this was raised in an appeal, the Court of Appeal ruled that she had no conflict of interest. Can anyone seriously question the belief that we live under an inquisition?
She claimed that that children's tears, belly aches, anxiety and tantrums were consistent with sexual abuse. But, under cross-examination, she could not think of anything that was ‘inconsistent with sexual abuse’.
Peter Ellis suffers a severe heart attack
During the first weekend of April 2005, 47 year old Peter Ellis suffered a severe heart attack in New Zealand.
The following letter to The Press on April 6 2005 speaks volumes:
A City Shamed - by John Blumsky, Waikuku
The severe heart attack suffered by Peter Ellis at the weekend should be a poignant reminder to us all how seriously flawed some of our democratic systems are. Ellis’s inability to gain justice since his Civic Creche conviction some 10 years ago has sapped his resolve.
That government agencies and their political masters have allowed this case to be shut down in a select committee for over two years is a disgrace and I am sceptical about its July completion.
That all politicians have surrendered their integrity to an apathetic electorate is unconscionable. But perhaps more apt would be that Hood’s book A City Possessed should be retitled ‘A City Shamed’.
Local papers carried headlines such as ‘Stress blamed for Ellis' heart attack’
It is doubtful if any convicted man in the world has garnered as much support and sympathy as Peter Ellis since his conviction over 10 years ago. Even he refused parole before his eventual release as it would have required him to plead guilty. The chilling aspect of this case is that not even the overwhelming evidence of his innocence has swayed the New Zealand authorities and prosecutors who jailed him.
Now Christchurch Central MP, Tim Barnett, who heads the select committee looking into the infamous Civic Creche case, has defended the almost two years delay in deciding how to respond to national calls for an inquiry. The case resulted in one bestselling book A City Possessed by Lynley Hood and the excellent Harper-Christie report that did ground-breaking analysis of the reality of a priori bias in our courts today where moral judgements are required.
During the week before his heart attack, two of his most staunch supporters died within days of each other.
Ellis served two-thirds of a 10-year jail sentence and was released in 2000.
Fresh breeze from New Zealand
Brian Rothery
Below is the first reaction we received from New Zealand to the parliament's justice and electoral select committee’s decision not to recommend a royal commission of inquiry into the Christchurch Civic Crèche case:
“After sitting on the petition calling for a royal commission of inquiry into the Christchurch Civic Crèche case for two years, NZ parliament's justice and electoral select committee has reported back. Despite finding that disquiet over the crèche case has caused public confidence in the justice system to plummet, and despite finding a long list of problems with the way sex abuse allegations are investigated and prosecuted, and despite finding that the justice system has great difficulty correcting miscarriages of justice, the select committee have declined to recommend a commission of inquiry. (If you want to sign a petition go HERE. )
The above pretty well reflects the deep disappointment of the many who have waited years for justice in the Peter Ellis case, who see not just one man’s innocence, and not just the correction of the injustices caused by the practitioners of the black arts of moral panic, but democracy itself in New Zealand under threat.
Within days of receiving this bad news, however, we began to see some of the reaction from New Zealand, and it was heartening. Although writers from around the world, including New Zealand, supply the copy for this web site, it is edited and largely written in Ireland, where the moral panic and the prosecution state are as virulent as in the other English speaking countries. But one cannot help from time to time wondering which country is the worst or the best in the English speaking group of countries, and the refusal of New Zealand’s government to either admit the injustice of the Christchurch Civic Crèche case or to condemn the people who used discredited satanic abuse and recovered memory and other ideologies to divide a country and almost ruin its reputation internationally suggested that New Zealand might indeed be the worst of the group. What first stopped me from drawing that conclusion was how bad all the others were, particularly the US and to my great regret and that of British friends the recent terrible slide of Great Britain into a police state.
Now however the latest bad news from New Zealand has given me hope for both that country and for the West, because that bad news has been received in New Zealand with an outpouring of both anger and scorn, to the extent that, to me at least, this appears to be the first really significant outpouring of righteous anger against totalitarian dogma in the West. My coming to this conclusion was caused chiefly by my awareness of how few writers in the West have the courage to stand up and be counted in a stand against the moral panics that have ruined our society.
Now from New Zealand, I hear and read many individuals condemning the parliament's justice and electoral select committee’s decision not to recommend a royal commission of inquiry into the Christchurch Civic Crèche case.
Lynley Hood, without whose book and campaign for justice the reaction might not have emerged so powerfully, said that the Ellis case had been an ideal opportunity to tackle the important issues involved, but that the government has not had the courage to face up to it. "The same people who were involved in the investigation and prosecution of the crèche case are still investigating and prosecuting sex cases and making the same mistakes," she said. "Until it's brought home to them that they stuffed up they are going to keep on making the same mistakes. The past has to be faced up to if we are going to learn from it."
Jonathon Harper, who with Richard Christie wrote the wonderful appraisal of the Eichelbaum report, has just published an article titled ‘Justice a Slow Train Coming for Ellis’ in the Christchurch Press.
Chris Trotter, writing in the Otago Daily Times, said, “There is something truly horrifying about this failure of our judicial system. Not only did it condemn a man whose guilt was in more than reasonable doubt to 10 years in prison, but it conferred upon Peter Ellis’s accusers an undeserved and entirely spurious credibility. The groups responsible for the ‘witch craze’ that we know as the Christchurch Civic Crèche child abuse scandal: all those ‘ritual abuse’ peddlers, ‘recovered memory’ counsellors, ‘all men are rapists’ feminists, ‘children never lie’ social workers and ‘Satan is among us’ Christian fundamentalists, have never been called to account.
Christchurch lawyer, David Ruth, spokesman for the legal advocacy group Just Cause, said that the response of the justice and electoral select committee into the historic sexual abuse case was a ‘cop-out’.
An editorial in The Press suggests that the select committee report has only ensured that the Ellis case will continue to be a divisive controversy in New Zealand.
The political party, United Future, called for an overhaul of the court system, and questioned whether the system should change from adversarial to inquisitorial for child sex offences. Its spokesman, Murray Smith, said that the court system was too adversarial and not centred on the need to find the truth, and that the courts should be based on truth, not arguments. The National leader Don Brash promises that Peter Ellis will get a full inquiry, if his party wins the election. He was one of the original backers of the call for an inquiry, and now says that he is surprised and disappointed with the committee's decision. He says many New Zealanders, including former judges, former Prime Ministers and academics, believe a full inquiry is necessary
The Peter Ellis support group claimed that the "Justice" Committee (their quotes) was ‘morally and ethically bankrupt’.
Returning to Chris Trotter’s article in the Otago Daily Times, titled ‘Decision compounds failure of criminal justice system’, he says “As a result, the catastrophic failure of our criminal justice system, represented by the Ellis case, will endure unacknowledged, unexamined, uncorrected, and unreputed. And unfortunate, because miscarriages of justice on the scale of the Ellis case exert a pernicious influence on every one of the institutions that they touch. Local government, the police, social welfare, the courts, the judiciary and now Parliament have all been tainted by their involvement. In every instance, ignorance, fear, and the singular reluctance of institutional authorities to ever admit to error, have combined to exacerbate and extend the original injustice.”
He went on to express the fear that the longer ‘this institutional infection’ is allowed to continue, the higher it rises, which is what has happened worldwide since the first fraudulent US ‘recovered memory’ lecturers came to New Zealand, where they ensured that the infection would now be spread worldwide. The faith system or ideology it expressed was allowed to replace scientific analyses and due process. That inquisitorial ideology was based on what Lynley Hood called the crimen exceptum, that special crime that all inquisitions need for the suspension of both rationality and due process. Trotter called it a ‘manic process’ – a ‘malign confluence of individual obsession, ideological dogma, religious bigotry and reckless careerism’.
Trotter is alarmed that while the truly mad cases of satanic abuse and recovered memory were finally exposed as manic in places such as the US, Canada and the UK, this did not happen in New Zealand, but if he knew as much as some of us about the frauds since carried out in the US and UK under the name of child pornography he might agree that the mania has simply found a new outlet, a new crimen exceptum in those countries.
Speaking on radio in New Zealand, Lynley Hood expressed the conviction that a royal commission of inquiry was the only way the problems raised by the case can be settled. She wants an independent overseas judge as she believes that everyone in NZ is contaminated in some way by the case, and because of the wide range of issues involved. She fears that without a royal commission of inquiry ‘these same people, therapists, police, prosecutors, and so on will continue to make the same mistakes’.
Her fellow petition signatory Richard Christie added, “As well as letting down the petitioners, the committee has let down justice in NZ. Many, including law professors and QCs, signed the petition due to concerns over an apparent judicial siege-mentality on this case, as did those who signed due to concerns over Ellis's guilt or innocence. Tuesday's labelling of the report as a ‘cop out’ by lawyer group Just Cause illustrates this. The ‘if and maybe’ options proffered by the committee's report simply do not address concerns over the total processes surrounding this particular case."
Pause for thought
My initial enthusiasm has been somewhat moderated upon learning that most of this good reaction is on the south island only, mainly in Christchurch, while it goes largely ignored elsewhere in NZ.
Another colleague informs me that there is overwhelming scorn and derision for the government over its failure to do anything about the Ellis case, but politicians, the bureaucracy and many key editors and journalists are in the pockets of the sex abuse industry. They are a very small but extremely powerful minority - so nothing gets done. It's not an election
issue - even though leader of the opposition Don Brash initiated the petition (before he became leader) and politicians from all parties signed it. Press releases and policies ignore the case and journalists don't bother to ask. The spin doctors seem to think its too hot to handle & they call the shots.
I have also been reminded that the Select Committee report (in balance against its failure to do anything for the creche
staff) is a remarkable condemnation of just about everything that went wrong with the case and just about everything about the justice system that needs to change. It is probably the work of a very able lawyer MP on the committee who soon realised that some members would never agree to recommend a commission of inquiry; indeed, would agree to anything as long as it wasn't a commission of inquiry - so he wrote in everything he could think of that needs to change in the justice system.
It will be interesting to see whether the report is acted on after the election
(17 September).
Click here for Petition.
Country by country
Clint Betterridge - stop this extradition! It's over.
The Peter Ellis story
The Shieldfield travesty
The Saskatoon story
The McMartin and other US stories
Act of infamy – the Nora Wall story
Bart Lauwaert tells his own story
Australia’s criminal involvement in Cambodia
Graham Cleghorn writes from Cambodian prisons
The setting up of Rudolf Knuchel
The Pitcairn sex trial – the cast and the story
 |
|
|
