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It shouldn't
require the turn of a
millennium, apt occasion though
it is, to recall how much our
system of law owes to a
particular leap in progress
centuries old--namely the one
that began when the forces of
rationality started to displace
those of unreason and
superstition. The process was a
long one, but ultimately the
world saw the ascendance of
rational rules of evidence, of
judges and juries. To fathom the
importance of this piece of
progress it is only necessary to
recall what came before--to
remember matters like the tests
used to determine the guilt or
innocence of people accused of
being witches.
Alleged
witches could be tried by their
neighbors--or, if this route
seemed to offer little hope,
they could choose the
judgment-of-God test, in which
they were thrown into a pond,
hands or feet tied. If an
accused witch drowned, this
meant, according to prevailing
wisdom of the age, that God had
accepted her into heaven and
therefore she was innocent. If
she managed to float, it was
taken as a sign that God had
rejected the accused, who was
then judged guilty of being a
witch and put to death
accordingly.
It is hard,
in our enlightened times, to
appreciate what the introduction
of a rational system of laws
meant, and the elementary ways
in which it impelled society's
progress. It is also worth
noting that in our enlightened
times, a rational justice system
is so central a value that that
any violations thereof stand out
as peculiarly shocking--a
throwback to the irrational
past.
We have
witnessed echoes of that past in
nearly two decades of child
sex-abuse trials, with all their
accusatory fervor, incredible
testimony and convictions based
on no evidence--all of which
have fallen apart or are in the
process of doing so.
Now the
courts have issued their
findings in the case of Manuel
Hidalgo Rodriguez, the migrant
farm worker swept up in the mass
arrests of Wenatchee, Wash.,
residents, sent off to trial and
prison in 1994 and 1995 on
charges of child molestation. In
a unanimous decision reversing
his conviction, the justices of
Washington state's Court of
Appeals wasted no words. They
had looked into the record and
the report of the Superior Court
judge specially appointed to
examine the case and they had
concluded, among other points,
that the state had "improperly
influenced" the testimony of the
accusing child witnesses. A
phrase like improperly
influenced could not of course
do justice to the investigating
judge's venomous, relentlessly
detailed characterizations of
the state's case and the
credibility of its
witnesses--but it would do.
Court
decisions like this are now the
nightmare that haunts the
Wenatchee prosecutors, who had
after all managed, in the heyday
of the town's alleged child
sex-ring scandals, to charge 43
people with a stunning variety
of offenses and to convict 21 of
them. It didn't help, either,
when one of the two sisters who
had made all the accusations
came forward two weeks ago to
tell local reporters, as she has
before, that the abuse
accusations had all been
invented, that she had been
medicated and hospitalized
against her will and otherwise
been prevented--by Child
Protective Services personnel
and state therapists--from
recanting her accusations in
court.
With nine of
their convictions by thrown out,
and the likelihood of much more
of the same to come, the
prosecutors are now embarked on
an all-out effort to arrange
plea bargains with those still
in prison--deals that would
preclude further court
challenges to their convictions.
Indeed prosecutors had made such
an offer to Mr. Hidalgo a few
months ago. He could enter a
guilty plea to a lesser charge
and thereby win immediate
release--an offer he promptly
refused.
Thanks to its
grotesque plot lines, its cast
of characters headed by chief
abuse investigator Detective
Robert Perez and his two foster
daughters, whose reports of
their near-nightly molestation
at orgies all over
town--including the church
altar--enthralled Child
Protective Services workers and
most of the town's
establishment, the Wenatchee
story has become something of a
legend. Indeed the moviesque
weirdness of this saga sometimes
threatens to obscure its raw
facts, among them that of the
torments visited on everyone
accused, arrested, hauled before
Mr. Perez and aides from Child
Protective Services, their
children dispatched to foster
homes. Among those thus arrested
and accused of sexually
assaulting their own children
were Mark and Carol Doggett, a
young couple who had, according
to intelligence gathered by
Child Protective Service
workers, directed their five
children to line up outside
their bedroom nearly every
night, so each could be molested
in turn.
When he was
first picked up and brought
before Mr. Perez, Mr. Doggett
recalls, he was astounded not
only by the charges but also the
vivid sexual details of the
attacks they told him he would
suffer in prison, if he didn't
confess to his crimes. "Some of
these acts, I promise you, I
never heard of," he observed,
with some wryness.
No less
astounding to him was the
presence, during this
interrogation, of the chief
supervisor of Wenatchee's Child
Protective Services, Tim Abbey.
Mr. Doggett's first thought had
been that he might be there as a
mediator, someone to appeal
to--he was, after all a social
worker. How much he was mistaken
in this was soon enough clear,
as Mr. Abbey himself began
describing what terrors Mr.
Doggett could expect in prison,
if he didn't confess.
Detectives,
he understood, often made such
threats--but a social worker?
What was the supervisor from
Child Protective Services doing
in the role of an adjunct police
interrogator? When the long
session finally ended, he
recalls, Mr. Abbey announced
that he was going to go home to
his wife and family, and that
Mr. Perez was going to go home
as well, but that Mr. Doggett
would be going off to prison.
Sentenced, in
1995, to nearly 11 years, the
Doggetts appealed. Their
convictions were overturned two
years later.
Elsewhere in
the nation, prosecutors in the
notorious Little Rascals day
care case in Edenton, N.C., case
this fall called a halt to their
long efforts, by dropping all
remaining charges against their
prime target, former school head
Robert Kelly. Addressing this
news, a committee formed to
defend Mr. Kelly and the six
other citizens accused in
Edenton issued a statement
noting that that Edenton was
next to the last of this
nation's high-profile sex-abuse
cases to be closed down, all of
them in favor of the accused.
The statement went on to declare
that "Only Gerald Amirault in
Massachusetts, who is now in his
14th year in prison, seems out
of reach of the workings of
justice."
Appeals
courts across the land have
grasped the obvious about these
cases, and ruled accordingly. In
Massachusetts alone has the
state's highest court viewed as
acceptable the kind of
prosecutorial corruption,
leading of child witnesses,
fabricated testimony and all the
sundry other perversions of
reason and law that led to the
conviction of the Amiraults.
This is the fact no one can
explain away, the affront to
rationality, not to mention
justice, that ensures, among its
other effects, that the
fulfillment of the prosecutors'
dearest wish--which is to see
the end, at last, of public
discussion and concerns about
the Amirault case--is a long way
off. |