Innocent Criminals

I was prompted to look up the details of the Peter Ellis case by a comment by DPF today that he was "aghast at how he was found guilty."

My opinion on the case was formed a number of years ago when I heard two of the victims being interviewed on the radio. And now, the more I read, the more sure I am that many of the supposed problems with the case don't so much show that Peter Ellis was innocent - they instead just show problems with the case. Therefore, I think that fact that the man is still in prison is a good thing. NZ has enough problems with released paedophiles as it is.

UPDATE: It seems he is out. It seemed with all the hysteria, it seened that he must have been still behind bars. Obviously being a convicted paedophile is bad for getting jobs close to children, so of course he wants to "clear his name".


So, I found it really enlightening to read an opinion piece published 10 years ago by Theodore Dalrymple on NZ's increased liberality with regards to criminality in our country. I'll use the example of the two girls that killed one of the girls' mothers in the 50's to illustrate how this liberality works:

The shift in the interpretation of the Parker-Hulme case signals a sea change in New Zealand's attitude toward crime in general, a change that has occurred everywhere else in the Western world. Public opinion at the time universally regarded the Parker-Hulme murder as the evil act of evil girls acting in the grip of an evil passion. Nowadays a different interpretation is almost as universal. A well-known book on the case, Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View, by two lesbian academics, Julie Glamuzina and Alison Laurie, sums up today's prevailing opinion.

According to the reinterpretation, the Parker-Hulme case was not a brutal and pointless murder but the natural, inevitable outcome of a grand passion thwarted by narrow-minded social prejudice and intolerance. New Zealand was then a repressed and repressive society, and something had to give. The authors unquestioningly accept the hydraulic model of human desire, according to which passion is like the pus in an abscess, which, if not drained, causes blood poisoning, delirium, and death. If society prevented two lesbian adolescents from acting upon their passion, therefore, it was only to be expected that they should have done to death the mother of one of them. The primordial wrongness of bashing people with bricks has vanished altogether.

In support of their hypothesis, the two authors asked a number of lesbians who grew up at the time of the case for their reaction to it. Yes, they replied, they understood the girls only too well, for they themselves had sometimes harbored murderous feelings toward their parents. Both the authors and the respondents overlooked the significant moral difference between occasionally wishing one's mother would drop dead and causing her actually to do so. Nor is this obtuseness exclusive to lesbians. The Los Angeles Times reported the film's director, Peter Jackson, as regarding his own film as nonjudgmental. This, of course, lays bare the curious moral stance of our age: it is not wrong to bash an innocent woman to death with a brick, but it is wrong to condemn the deed and its perpetrators.

From being branded monsters of depravity, Parker and Hulme now appear almost martyrs to a cause. Public opinion admires them—not because they managed after their release from five years' imprisonment to make successful new lives for themselves, thus pointing to the hope and possibility of redemption (Juliet Hulme has become an internationally acclaimed crime novelist, under the name Ann Perry). Instead, it's because they are thought to have engaged in a lesbian affair at a time of extreme primness and propriety in New Zealand—though Hulme explicitly denies that this was the case. They are believed to have acted upon forbidden desires, the greatest feat of heroism that the bien-pensants of our age can imagine.

I think a similar thing has occurred with the Peter Ellis case. The man is a homosexual who was working in a child-care centre with young children. But he's now somehow become the poster boy for "unjustly" accused men everywhere, and for some reason the inappropriateness of him working in the creche is almost ignored.

Another case of injustice, even more destructive in its effects than the Bain case, is the case of Peter Ellis, a young man accused and found guilty in 1996 of horrific sexual abuse of children in a municipal day-care center in Christchurch. The case has many, and eerie, parallels with a notorious case that took place in the town of Wenatchee, Washington.

It was alleged and supposedly proved in court that Ellis had strung children up, sodomized them, and made them drink urine and have oral sex with him. This continued for a prolonged period, without any physical evidence of his activities ever having come to light. No parent suspected that anything was wrong until the initial accusation was made, and then accusations followed in epidemic fashion.

It now emerges that much of the evidence was tainted. The woman who made the first accusation was a fanatic who possessed and had read a great deal of literature about satanic abuse. The detective in charge of the investigation (who has since resigned from the police) had an affair with her and with another of the accusing mothers. The foreman of the jury was related to one of the accusers. Many of the children have since retracted their testimonies, which social workers had obtained by lengthy interrogation. And now the homosexual lobby has alleged that Ellis was accused in the first place because he was a homosexual, and because it was unusual for a man to work in a day-care center. The controversy over the case threatens to degenerate into an argument as to who is most politically correct.

A New Zealand court has given credence to accusations that even the Spanish Inquisition might have found preposterous, a sign oddly enough of how far the courts have come under the influence of the bien-pensants, and how much they fear their censure and crave their approbation. For sexual abuse is the one crime that escapes the all-embracing understanding and forgiveness of such liberals, being a crime whose supposed pervasiveness in all ages exposes as hypocritical the pretensions of bourgeois society to decency and morality and makes clear, as well, that any one of us, in the hands of a sufficiently sensitive therapist, might discover his own secret victimhood, absolving him of responsibility for his life and actions. Sexual abuse is thus an intellectual battering ram with which to discredit the traditional edifice of self-restraint and to wipe away the personal responsibility of individuals, and no judge can do himself harm in the eyes of the right-thinking by taking the hardest and most punitive of lines toward it, whether it actually occurred in any particular instance or not.

It certainly seems that in the Peter Ellis case that Dalrymple is saying that Peter Ellis might not have been guilty, and maybe he isn't guilty and a huge injustice has been done. However, all of that is obscured by a number of other factors that make trying to make sense of it all really difficult. But to have Peter Ellis as poster boy for innocent man behind bars - I don't buy it.

Small children just don't make up testimony of the sort that these children gave. They don't have that sort of imagination.

Related Link: What Causes Crime? ~ City Journal