BACKGROUND: WIKIPEDIA: "Peter Hugh McGregor Ellis (30 March 1958 – 4 September 2019) was a New Zealand child care worker who was wrongfully convicted of child sexual abuse. He was at the centre of one of the country's most enduring judicial controversies, after being found guilty in June 1993 in the High Court of New Zealand on 16 counts of sexual offences involving children in his care at the Christchurch Civic Creche and sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment. He maintained his innocence until his death 26 years later and was supported by many New Zealanders in his attempts to overturn his convictions. Concerns about the reliability of the convictions centred on lurid stories told by many of the children and the interview techniques used to obtain their testimony. Ellis was exonerated by a landmark Supreme Court decision in October 2022, which found that evidence against him and misleading expert testimony resulted in a miscarriage of justice in New Zealand. In 1994, Ellis took his case to the Court of Appeal of New Zealand which quashed convictions on three of the charges but upheld the sentence. His conviction and sentence were upheld in his second appearance before the Court of Appeal in October 1999. In March 2000, former Chief Justice Sir Thomas Eichelbaum was appointed to conduct a ministerial inquiry reviewing the children's evidence. His report upheld the guilty verdicts. The same month Governor-General Sir Michael Hardie Boys rejected Ellis' third bid for pardon on the advice of Justice Minister Phil Goff, who was satisfied with Eichelbaum's finding that Ellis had failed to prove his convictions were unsafe. Ellis refused to attend parole board hearings while in prison because he would have to confess to the crimes in order to argue for early release.[1] He was released in February 2000 after serving seven years in prison. Two books and numerous articles[2] have been written about the case. After his release, Ellis continued campaigning to clear his name. In 2019, nineteen years after he was released, he appealed to the Supreme Court to have his conviction overturned. Although he died of cancer before the appeal could be heard, the Supreme Court delivered a judgment in October 2022 allowing the appeal and quashing Ellis' convictions.[3 The Ellis case was one of several similar high profile child abuse cases around the world in the 1980s and early 1990s. It has been mentioned as a cause in the decline in the number of male teachers in New Zealand schools.[4]
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Another judge who has written on miscarriages of justice was the late Justice Grant Hammond, a former president of the Law Commission. In a lecture at the University of Waikato, he listed several ways a miscarriage of justice could occur, including that the evidence of expert witnesses had sometimes been "over-estimated". Whatever the cause, the Ellis case is just the latest in a growing list of miscarriages of justice to blight New Zealand's judicial landscape. The problem has been long acknowledged, leading to the establishment in 2020 of a Criminal Cases Review Commission to investigate cases where people claimed they had been wrongfully convicted. Before then, people who had exhausted legal appeals through the courts could seek redress through what was called the Governor-General's "royal prerogative of mercy". It was not used often. The new commission was swamped with applications when it opened for business in July 2020."
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STORY: "'Miscarriage by expert': Ellis judge previously gave warning about testimony," by Open Justice Multimedia journalist Ric Stevens, published by The New Zealand Herald, on October 6, 2022.
PHOTO CAPTION: "Peter Ellis died in 2019. His case was heard in the Supreme Court posthumously."
GIST: "In branding the Peter Ellis case a miscarriage of justice, the Supreme Court has added his conviction to a growing list of cases where the legal system has got it wrong.
In the Ellis case, the Supreme Court made it clear there had been a "substantial miscarriage of justice resulted from the expert evidence" given under a now-repealed law governing expert witness testimony in child sexual abuse cases.
Particularly, it found that expert witness Dr Karen Zelas, at that time a specialist psychiatrist, gave evidence that exceeded the proper bounds of the law in several ways, including a lack of balance and "circular reasoning".
One of the judges on the Supreme Court panel hearing the Ellis appeal, Justice Susan Glazebrook, has previously written on the issue of what she called "miscarriage by expert".
In a 2018 article in the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review, she examined a number of overseas cases and showed how expert witness testimony had led to wrongful convictions.
Her article stated that the US Innocence Project, which investigates miscarriages of justice, found that improper or invalidated forensic science contributed to wrongful convictions in more than 50 per cent of cases that were subsequently overturned by DNA evidence.
"The message ... is for the courts to be vigilant in making sure proper standards are kept by experts giving evidence," Justice Glazebrook wrote.
"This may be due to a particular expert's fallibility but may also be because scientific knowledge has moved on."
Another judge who has written on miscarriages of justice was the late Justice Grant Hammond, a former president of the Law Commission.
In a lecture at the University of Waikato, he listed several ways a miscarriage of justice could occur, including that the evidence of expert witnesses had sometimes been "over-estimated".
Whatever the cause, the Ellis case is just the latest in a growing list of miscarriages of justice to blight New Zealand's judicial landscape.
The problem has been long acknowledged, leading to the establishment in 2020 of a Criminal Cases Review Commission to investigate cases where people claimed they had been wrongfully convicted.
Before then, people who had exhausted legal appeals through the courts could seek redress through what was called the Governor-General's "royal prerogative of mercy". It was not used often.
The new commission was swamped with applications when it opened for business in July 2020.
In the first month, the commission received four times the number of applications it had been expecting.
After six months, applications had reached 125, the number which had been expected in the first 12 months and on which its $4 million annual budget had been based.
By August this year, the latest month for which numbers are available, it had received 325 applications – they have been flowing in at an average of 13 a month.
Nearly half of them – 47 per cent – have been received from people convicted of sexual offences.
The commission expects to make its first referral to an appeal court later this year.
In the meantime, miscarriage of justice cases like Ellis' continue to make their way through the appeal courts outside the commission's pathway.
In July this year, the Supreme Court quashed Alan Hall's conviction for the murder of Arthur Easton, who was killed in a violent home invasion in 1985.
Hall was convicted in 1986 at age 23 and spent a total of 19 years behind bars for a crime he always maintained he did not commit.
He has applied for compensation for conviction and wrongful imprisonment, 37 years after Easton died.
Among previous notable cases, Teina Pora was convicted twice – in 1994 and 2000 – for the 1992 murder of Susan Burdett. In March 2015 the Privy Council quashed his convictions.
He received $3.5 million for wrongful conviction and the 22 years he spent in prison.
Arthur Allan Thomas was awarded $950,000 in 1979 after wrongfully spending nine years in jail for the murders of Jeanette and Harvey Crewe. He received a royal pardon following a commission of inquiry into his case.
David Bain was convicted of the 1994 murder of five family members and spent 13 years in prison before being acquitted at a second trial.
He sought compensation but retired Australian judge Ian Callinan, asked to review his claim by a National Government, found that Bain had not established his innocence "on the balance of probabilities".
Bain received an ex gratia payment of $925,000 in recognition of the time and expenses consumed by the compensation process, and to avoid further litigation."
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resurce. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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