Supreme Court decision on Peter Ellis appeal to be revealed on Friday

The final word from the New Zealand courts on the Peter Ellis case which started more than 30 years ago will be delivered on Friday.

The Supreme Court this week alerted interested parties that the court would deliver its decision on the appeal by now deceased child care worker Peter Ellis at 2pm on Friday

The decision appealing 13 convictions of child abuse at the Christchurch Civic Creche comes more than 30 years after the allegations arose in 1991.

The reading of the judgment will start at 2pm and will be livestreamed. No reporting of the judgment will be allowed until the reading has finished.

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The decision will have wide-ranging ramifications and not just for Ellis and his family. It will give reasons for the court allowing Ellis's appeal in the first place. Ellis died of bladder cancer in 2019 after his appeal had been lodged, and most lawyers believed that spelled the end of the appeal.

After a suggestion from the Supreme Court judges, Ellis' lawyers argued tikanga (Māori customary law) was part of New Zealand's common law and under tikanga Ellis had a right to clear his name or re-establish his mana even if deceased. Friday's decision will reveal what the Supreme Court made of the argument.

Ellis's appeal against the convictions was heard in a two-week hearing in October last year in which expert evidence from both sides was presented.

Experts for Ellis said the interviews of the children on whose allegations the charges were based were tainted by parental questioning and undermined by interviewing techniques, which would not be acceptable today. The Crown argued the interviews were adequate even by today's standards and the children were telling the truth. Contamination of the children's accounts by their parents had been negated by the interviewers, it said.

The allegations against Ellis, then 33, started in November 1991 against a backdrop of increased anxiety about child sexual abuse in western countries. It was a time when rumours about organised child pornography makers and theories about the middle-class satanic ritual abuse of children were rife.

The allegations followed a comment by the 4-year-old son of a former creche parent that he didn't like “Peter's black penis”. His mother had authored a handbook on child sexual abuse and had recovered memories of being sexually abused herself. She would go on to accuse another male worker at another creche.

By the time Ellis came to trial in April 1993, 116 children, who had attended the creche at various times during Ellis' term – 1986 to 1991 – had been interviewed by specialist Department of Social Welfare interviewers. The boy who started off the case disclosed no abuse in three interviews.

At a preliminary hearing of the charges, the evidence of about 20 complainant children had been selected to form the basis of the charges against Ellis. At his trial, the list of 20 had been cut to 13.

Four female creche workers, including the creche supervisor Gaye Davidson, were also charged, but the charges were dropped after pre-trial applications.

Ellis was arrested in March 1992 and his trial started in April the next year. The jury eventually found Ellis guilty of 16 charges of abusing seven children in his care and he was sentenced to 10 years' jail. Five of the parents of the seven children worked in the sex abuse field.

During a hearing in the Court of Appeal in 1994, one of the seven children, admitted her allegations about Ellis were a lie. The appeal also revealed none of the 21 children named by the seven children in their evidential interviews as other victims had confirmed the accusations.

Subsequent court decisions and an inquiry by former retired Chief Justice Sir Thomas Eichelbaum in 2000 found the children's evidence was sound enough to support the jury verdicts.

Ellis still hoped an appeal to the Privy Council based in London would clear his name and reveal the truth. Money to pay for the appeal was lacking and in 2004 New Zealand abolished the right to appeal to the Privy Council and set up the Supreme Court.

It wasn't until 2019 that Ellis lodged an application in the Supreme Court seeking leave to appeal against his 1993 convictions. The leave was granted in July that year, but it all appeared too little, too late when he died of bladder cancer several months later.