Mr Ellis was convicted in 1993 on 16 charges of sexual offending against seven complainants who had been at the creche, but he and a group of supporters contended then and ever since that the court’s guilty verdicts were untrue.
Two appeals to the Court of Appeal in 1994 and 1999 were unsuccessful, and Mr Ellis served seven years in prison.
The Supreme Court yesterday ruled that expert witness evidence should have been ruled inadmissible or at least highlighted to the jury as potentially unreliable, to the degree that there had been a miscarriage of justice.
Dunedin author Lynley Hood devoted several years to pursuing an acquittal for Mr Ellis and wrote a best-selling book, A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case about the case. She said it was a huge relief that the court had recognised that a mistake was made.
"I ended up writing a book wondering how many people could have got it so wrong," she told Newstalk ZB.
The case had transformed into a battle between good and evil rather than a consideration of the guilt or otherwise of Peter Ellis, she said.
In 2019 the Supreme Court agreed to consider a further appeal by Mr Ellis, but he died in September of that year, before the appeal could be heard.
Normally the death of the appellant would bring legal proceedings to an end, but Mr Ellis’ lawyers succeeded in convincing three out of five justices that it was in the interests of justice that the Supreme Court hear the appeal.
Two dissenting justices considered that the interests of the complainants and their families that the appeal not proceed outweighed all the other factors, and that the public interest factors were not as significant as the majority judges believed them to be.
Having decided to consider the appeal, the court then unanimously allowed Mr Ellis’ appeal and quashed his convictions.
It found that expert evidence given by specialist psychiatrist Dr Karen Zelas at trial lacked balance, suffered from circular reasoning and that much of it should not have been admitted at trial.
Her evidence highlighted 20 behaviours exhibited by many of the complainants, all of which Dr Zelas said were generally consistent with the behaviours of sexually abused children.
However, the Supreme Court said Dr Zelas’ comments on the credibility and reliability of the complainants evidence were not permitted under evidence laws in force at the time.
The judges held that none of the problems with Dr Zelas’ evidence were resolved by cross-examination, the evidence of the defence’s expert witness or the trial judge’s summing up, which resulted in a substantial miscarriage of justice.
Dr Zelas had departed so far from appropriate standards, and her evidence had had such a significant impact during the trial, that it may well have affected the verdicts, the judgement said.
The Supreme Court also found that the jury had not been correctly informed of the level of risk that the complainants evidence had been contaminated by outside influences, and that if it had been, jurors might have created a reasonable doubt about some of the allegations made against Mr Ellis.
Ms Hood said that she had no idea when she started writing about Mr Ellis whether he was guilty or not, but had wanted to gather as much evidence as she could and assess if there was any basis for the allegations against him.
"The big problem was that there was no physical evidence and no child made an allegation against Peter Ellis while he was working at the creche: it was only later."
