Editorial: Goff right to reject petition on Ellis

A book challenging the conviction of Peter Ellis on charges of child abuse in a Christchurch creche has made a powerful impression on those who read it. They include an impressive list of prominent people, published in the Herald on Wednesday, who have put their names to a petition for a commission of inquiry into the Ellis case.

So far Justice Minister Phil Goff has been unmoved. "Judicial decisions are made by people with the skill and experience to do so," he said. "They are not made by politicians, authors or notable people."

Actually, there are several lawyers and even a retired High Court judge, Justice Laurence Greig, on the list too. But the minister has a point and it is this:

A book, no matter how well researched and compelling its conclusions, is ultimately one person's version of events. A criminal trial is a different kind of inquiry. With her book, A City Possessed, Lynley Hood has reflected a widespread view that Ellis may have been the victim of a cause.

Nobody needs to have read the book to share an impression that social workers and police, in their determination to prosecute child abuse, sometimes seem too credulous where the claims of children are concerned. Their rule of thumb has seemed to be that children have no reason to make things up, and that if some of their stories seemed fanciful there had to be a trigger for the child's imagination. Once an investigator suspected abuse, no line of questioning of the child seemed too suggestive or prejudicial.

But once a case is brought to court, leading questions can be challenged and prejudicial assumptions excluded. Much of the concern over the Ellis case arises by all accounts from evidence of children that was excluded because it was simply not credible. Ellis' supporters argue that had the jury heard it, the rest of the children's evidence would have been received in a different light.

Lawyers, no less than authors, select the evidence they present for its value to the case they are making. Defence counsel are particularly selective, doing their utmost to exclude any adverse information about the defendant that is not necessary to a bare description of events giving rise to the charge. In this way, juries are often denied background knowledge that most people would consider relevant to a judgment of guilt but which the law considered prejudicial. Prosecuting authorities are supposed to be more even-handed in laying out their evidence, presenting what they have gathered whether or not it supports their case.

In that respect a good book will resemble a prosecution case. In fact a good way of assessing the author's reliability is to note whether inconvenient comments and facts occur in the account. A book built entirely on a defence case would be a tendentious document indeed. But no matter how balanced a book may be, it needs to come to a clear, convincing and preferably upsetting conclusion to warrant publication. And no matter how balanced its case, it is one person's construction.

A courtroom, by contrast, is a testing arena for conflicting versions of events, aimed at convincing a dispassionate judge or 12 anonymous citizens who have no personal interest riding on their conclusion. For that reason, the Justice Minister is right to resist an inquiry into a case that has been judged in courtrooms several times now. He needs to see new evidence before he could consider reopening the case. Plainly he has not seen it in the book.

He is not impressed by the list of luminaries who have lent their names to the cause. Their views carry no more weight than those of any other citizens. Like us all, they know only what they have read.