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BOSTON--On May 6, members
of the Supreme Judicial Court of
Massachusetts heard oral arguments in the
Amirault case--the final process before the
decision determining whether Cheryl Amirault
must be returned to prison. The tortuous
legal journey that had brought her here had
been long, and one she now traveled alone,
her mother Violet having died, in 1997,
while awaiting disposition of their fate.
Cheryl and Violet
Amirault were first released from prison in
1995 when a lower court judge overturned
their convictions--a temporary victory, as
it turned out. In 1997, the Supreme Judicial
Court granted the prosecutors' appeal that
they be returned to prison. Two months
later, the day the women were due to be sent
back, a second judge vacated their
convictions and granted the motion for a new
trial. Again the prosecutors appealed. The
question now is whether the court will
uphold the reversal or again grant the
state's appeal. The justices are expected to
issue their decision shortly.
The prosecutor began by
arguing in a soft voice that child witnesses
against the Amirault family hadn't been led
into their accusations of sexual abuse--a
presentation that engendered similarly
gentle inquiries from most of the justices.
A faint air of somnolence settled over the
rear of the room, the packed spectator's
section. The Amiraults and all matters
concerning them were now again major news in
Boston. So they had been in the 1980s when
Violet Amirault, owner of the highly
regarded Fells Acres Day School, her newly
married daughter, Cheryl, and son, Gerald,
were accused of committing the vilest of sex
crimes against small children in their care.
A first accusation, called in on a
hotline--that Gerald had assaulted a
five-year-old boy--soon led to many others
against Violet and Cheryl as well. The
school that the then 60-year-old Violet
Amirault had run for 20 years, that was her
pride, joy and exclusive interest in life,
was immediately closed. Following their
trial in 1987, Violet and Cheryl were
sentenced to eight to 20 years in prison,
eight of which they served before their
sentence was reversed. Gerald, tried
separately, was given 30 to 40 years. In the
1980s, as in the courtroom today, the
prosecutors maintained that the prosecution
of the Amirault family had been proper, and
that justice had been done.
This morning would bring,
it seemed, no news, nothing in the
arguments, nothing particularly revealing in
the comments from the bench. So it appeared,
until the counsels for the Amiraults rose to
present their case, at which point Justice
Charles Fried assumed the role of chief
interrogator. Justice Fried was the author
of the 1997 decision that the Amiraults
should remain in prison in the interest of
"finality."
Now, a marveling Justice
Fried wanted to know, why should Amirault
attorney Daniel R. Williams refer to this as
an extraordinary case? Cases like this came
before the court regularly, the justice
averred--of "parents, caretakers and
boyfriends engaging in exactly the same kind
of conduct that is charged here." And they
came, the judge emphasized, "all the time."
In various quarters of
the courtroom people stared at one another.
If charges that small children had been
assaulted en masse in magic-secret rooms, by
an entire family of molesters headed by an
elderly nursery school head who had
unaccountably become, at age 62, a pedophile
and child rapist--children daily terrorized,
forced to watch animals mutilated, violated
by attackers disguised as clowns and
elephants, children who continued
nevertheless going merrily off to school
every day to be assaulted with sticks and
knives which magically left no mark, and
photographed by clowns with big cameras--if
cases like this were presented to the court
all the time, as Justice Fried now claimed,
it was certainly news.
When Amirault attorney
James Sultan pointed out in the course of
the questioning that, contrary to the
prosecutors' claims, no child and no parent
had any complaint about Fells Acres till the
investigators moved in--only then did
parents begin finding symptoms of
abuse--Justice Fried responded, "So now,
it's the parents whose testimony is
tainted." There was more of the same as the
justice went on to declare, in heavily
disbelieving tones, that the attorney was
now saying that the parents were also
victims of suggestibility.
They were familiar, these
tones, with their clear implication that
anyone who could raise doubts about the word
of parents in these cases had committed a
gross violation against decency. They were
familiar because they were the tones of the
prosecutors, not only in the Amirault case
but all others like it--and all depended
heavily on the testimony of parents. All the
defense attorneys could expect to hear this
tone. Particularly any attorney who pointed
out that the many extreme symptoms so many
parents began remembering had never worried
them before the investigators came to town,
or even moved them to bring their child to a
doctor. The juries, too, would get the same
message--that to doubt the parents was to
add to the suffering of the abused. For in
these cases, it was understood, the parents
were to be treated not simply as witnesses
but as co-victims.
And so many of them had
come to look upon themselves, as they
revealed when they showed up occasionally in
some television interview, their voices
altered, dressed in wigs and disguises, to
speak of the suffering they had endured, the
suffering their children would endure, if
the molesters were to be released. Many of
them had had in the course of their
suffering also collected large amounts of
settlement money from the various schools'
insurance companies. The parent of one of
the child witnesses against the Amiraults
put a lien on Violet's property just one
month after the first accusation--just the
beginning of the money claims. By the time
it was over the insurers had given the
plaintiffs settlements totaling more than
$20 million.
The mother of child M,
the first to accuse Gerald, had given an
account that was a maze of conflicting
stories impossible to follow but one thing
is clear enough. Preoccupied by the danger
of child abuse--a subject much in the
air--she had repeatedly pressed her son to
talk about molestation months before making
her charge. She told the child, moreover,
that his Uncle Walter had been fondled when
he was a boy. The reasons she offered for
her suspicions of abuse were varied--among
them, she said, the fact that the boy didn't
bring drawings home from Fells Acres as he
had at his former nursery school. It was
clear, too, that her son frequently wet his
clothing and had done so while at Fells
Acres, so that Gerald had to change the
boy's pants. Pressed to talk about abuse the
boy would say later that Gerald had pulled
his pants down.
The boy had recently
endured highly disturbing
experiences--violent strife between his
parents, his father's departure from home,
his mother's psychiatric hospitalization,
the loss of a beloved puppy the parents
decided to leave behind when they moved, the
move itself, a new nursery school. Still the
mother decided that her son's bedwetting and
other behavioral changes could only be the
result of sexual abuse at Fells Acres.
Before and during the
trial she altered her account of events
several times, while her brother, Uncle
Walter, remembered only a day before he was
to testify that his nephew had also told him
Gerald had committed oral sodomy on him--a
charge the uncle had not thought to raise
for nearly two years. The mother--bearing in
mind, perhaps, that a person himself
formerly abused might not be considered the
most objective witness--now remembered that
it was not her brother Walter who had been
molested, but a different brother. Now
deceased.
Justice Fried's comments
touched, however unwittingly, on a signature
aspect of all cases like this--the role of
the parents. The answer to the mock
question--whether the attorney could
possibly be saying the parents too were
led--was that of course they were, and that
no aspect of these trials was more obvious,
or more important to the prosecutors'
success. Many parents rejected the
opportunity to join these cases--but those
that did sign up became true believers,
agents of the prosecutors deeply invested in
the state's case. They rehearsed their
children, interrogated them at home and
often enough endorsed even those charges
prosecutors hastily discarded.
In the Wee Care case of
New Jersey, one mother, a school board
member, told the grand jury of her
four-and-a-half year old son's charges that
teacher Kelly Michaels had stuck a pencil
and spoon in his ear, that the aide had
given him a truth drink and that the teacher
had threatened to cut the children into
little pieces. And did she think her son
might be fantasizing, the mother was asked.
"No," she explained, he was "merely
recounting what had happened during the
day."
Justice Fried had also
raised another issue, however inadvertently,
that was the signal feature of these
prosecutions--the extraordinary character of
the accusations. It was of course not true
that child sex abuse charges like those
directed at the Amiraults came before the
court all the time. The fantastic
prosecutions of innocent citizens in the
McMartin case, the Kelly Michaels case, and
the like begun in the early 1980s had, like
that of the Amiraults, spawned the most
phenomenal accusations of abuse--phenomenal
and also almost exactly the same everywhere
these trials were held. Citizens of Boston
stunned to read in the newspapers about
animals tortured and secret rooms at the
Amiraults' school could not have known in
just how many parts of the country,
prosecutors' investigators had been able to
uncover these same crimes, virtually
identical in all their colorful detail.
In the brutalities of
actual child abuse courts see every day,
there are no clowns, no elephants, no
butchered bluebirds or magic rooms. The
charges are plain, stark, violation without
frills. Here children don't talk about being
molested in hot air balloons, as in the
McMartin case, or visits from robots, as in
Amirault. Nor are they given to stories
about magic potions, about being forced to
drink urine or eat excrement--details that
emerged again and again in cases from New
Jersey to California. And not surprisingly,
since so many interrogators questioning
children worked from the same list of
alleged abuse symptoms, the same menu of
pedophilic preferences.
Child B, who testified
against Cheryl and Violet and Gerald
Amirault, testified at trial about the
teachers who tied him up naked to a tree
outside the school and the killing of
animals. Something bad happened to a dog's
leg.
Q) "What happened to his
leg?"
A) "Vi and Cheryl took it
off."
Q) "How did they take his
leg off?"
A) "With a knife."
The child also testified
about robots. And what did the robot look
like, he was asked?
"An ordinary robot," came
the answer.
Few people by now will be
surprised by any of this, so much has
everyone now learned about the way the child
witnesses in these cases were used. The
justices too now know, in the fullest
detail, how the Amiraults came to be
accused, and none will be able to deny it.
This much at least Judge Isaac Borenstein,
the second to overturn Violet's and Cheryl's
convictions, ensured when he issued his
scathing set of findings last June, in which
he charged that "The Amirault family was
targeted in a climate of fear and panic,"
that law enforcement authorities and
investigators had shown no interest in
determining whether anything had actually
happened to the children and that
investigators "used every trick in the book"
to get the children to say what they wanted
them to say.
Nevertheless, Gerald
Amirault is still in prison, where he has
been now for 13 years. It remains a fact,
too, that all the headline-making cases of
this kind around the country--the making of
so many prosecutors' careers--have by now
been overturned, discredited as travesties.
Everywhere but in Massachusetts. History
will render its own judgment if Justice
Fried and colleagues decide that in
Massachusetts alone, so obvious a travesty
should be allowed to stand, in the name of
finality. |