Dear Ministry of Justice,

In June 2003, a petition on behalf of Peter Ellis was presented to Parliament’s Justice and Electoral Select Committee.

Please supply me with the Justice Ministry’s submission to that committee, any oral material that it provided the committee (and vice versa), and its responses to questions from the committee (and vice versa). Please note that this request includes but is not limited to emails, deleted emails, file notes, letters, faxes and any other communication between the committee and the ministry.

In 2005, the Justice and Electoral Select Committee recommended that “section 340 of the Crimes Act 1961 be amended so that, in an adversarial environment, multiple allegations of sexual crimes substantially based on the evidence of more than one complainant should not be included in an indictment without very close consideration of the risk of the jury drawing a conclusion from the totality of the charges rather than the necessary detailed examination of each allegation.”

Has the Crimes Act been amended as per the committee’s recommendation?

Yours faithfully,

Ross Francis