The Wall Street Journal
October 31, 2000
A
Hearing in Boston
By Dorothy Rabinowitz
On Sept. 20, police guards escorted Gerald Amirault
to a small Boston hearing room soon to be crowded with
relatives, friends and other interested parties.
Here, the last imprisoned member of the Amirault family
would meet with the governor's board that recommends
approval or denial of commutation appeals. He was
permitted a suit and tie for this occasion, and an
occasion it was, there could be no doubt. Few prisoners
seeking commutation are granted a hearing before the
board, as Gerald Amirault and his attorneys knew. They
knew, also, how few such appeals are granted.
Among the others here today were Gerald Amirault's wife,
children and extended family, a quiet crowd with an air
of slightly exhausted anticipation. They had attended
many hearings, awaited many decisions, always wary of
hope, and invariably, uncontrollably, hopeful
nonetheless.
Near them, just across a narrow aisle, another silent
contingent of spectators sat. These were the parents and
other relatives of the children who testified at the
mid-1980s trials of Violet Amirault, the owner of the
Fells Acres Day School in Malden, Mass., her adult
daughter Cheryl, and son Gerald.
Famous throughout the state and well beyond, the charges
against the Amiraults involved atrocious sexual crimes,
notably identical to those of most of the other renowned
prosecutions of child care workers mounted during this
period. The 60-year-old Mrs. Amirault was accused of
raping a child with a magic wand, of assaulting another
sexually with a large butcher knife, Gerald of abusing
children in a magic room while dressed as a clown, and
Cheryl of similar unspeakable violations.
Children said that the Amiraults had slaughtered
bluebirds, that Cheryl Amirault herself had cut the leg
off a squirrel and killed a dog, to name just a few of
the charges soberly recorded by the abuse investigators.
All across the nation where these trials were held, the
clowns and magic rooms and mutilated animals had made
their appearance in testimony presented by prosecutors.
After two sensational trials based on the testimony from
the four- and five-year-old child witnesses, Gerald was
sentenced to 30-40 years, and Violet and Cheryl to 8-20
years.
One of those witnesses for the prosecution today sat
amid the knot of Fells Acres parents. In her early 20s
now, the former nursery school pupil had come, like the
parents, to argue against commutation of Gerald's
sentence.
First, however, would come certain procedural matters,
instructions, introductions, ground rules, and a roster
of other speakers, beginning with Gerald -- Gerald who
had only to begin speaking to undo every shred of the
calm formality with which these proceedings had begun. A
palpable tide of emotion flooded the room as he
addressed a board composed of three former prosecutors,
a former state trooper, a former probation officer and a
victim's representative.
He had been in prison more than 14 years, most of them
in segregation units; he had tried, all that time, to
figure out how this misery had come to him and his
family and he had failed, Gerald told the Board of
Pardons. He had no answers. He was not an expert. He
asked now, he said, only for an end to the nightmare in
which he and his family had lived for so many years. He
asked also that the Board not hold it against him that
he refused to confess that he was guilty, now as always,
and that he would continue to do so. "I am absolutely
innocent of all these charges."
Under exhaustive questioning by a Board member, he
readily conceded that he had entered no prison program
for the rehabilitation of sex offenders all the years of
his imprisonment. He was not a sex offender, Mr.
Amirault carefully explained, by way of response.
The subject was thorny, given the prevailing view in the
corrections system that convicted offenders must accept
guilt to be considered rehabilitated. Like his mother
Violet (now deceased) and his sister, Gerald had
continued to assert his innocence from the first
accusations, made in 1984, on through all the years of
their incarceration. What their refusal to confess guilt
cost Violet and Cheryl was abundantly clear in the
reports rejecting their parole applications.
"Parole denied. Vigorously denies the offenses," noted
the 1992 decision on Violet. The report concluded that
the 66-year-old Mrs. Amirault therefore remained, "a
risk to the community if released." On Cheryl's parole
applications, it was noted that she had committed
"heinous crimes for which she takes no responsibility."
Also on the list of those addressing the Board this day
were Gerald Amirault's wife, his teenage son, and his
two conspicuously handsome daughters -- one a college
senior of 21, the other 20 and in her junior year. Their
voices breaking, each described the father they had
known as children and knew now, the father shut away but
at the center of their lives nonetheless. The agony of
all the years had pressed itself into these voices raw
with longing and grief. In the small hearing room,
people fought tears, or stared straight ahead with a
trapped look. At the rear of the room, the same briskly
professional security officer who had searched everyone
sat and wept.
Mr. Amirault's attorney, James L. Sultan, affirmed in
his own statement that this hearing concerned only the
question of commutation, and of disparate punishment for
the same crimes. That disparity was obvious enough in
Gerald's sentence as compared to the one given the
women. Now, the attorney pointed out, the Board could
see evidence of a still more glaring inequity. Last
October, when her court appeal had been rejected and
Cheryl faced return to prison -- amid widespread
publicity -- the District Attorney agreed to revise and
revoke her sentence to time served. Yet today, the DA
adamantly opposed any such relief for Gerald. That was
the issue, Mr.Sultan averred; he understood that it was
not the business of the Board to address questions of
guilt or innocence, or the merits of the prosecution.
Everyone understood. And still there was no way to
ignore the elephant in the living room -- that huge body
of opinion, legal and other, which now saw the case
against the Amiraults as a sham built on accusations
coaxed from children drilled in stories about a bad
clown and a magic room. Three lower court judges who had
looked at this prosecution were of the same emphatic
opinion, and had made no secret of the fact.
In the end, it was the representative from the DA's
office who would bring the elephant trundling in,
however inadvertently, and remind everyone of all that
had made this case notorious. Notwithstanding the
stricture against arguments about guilt or innocence --
which the Board is not supposed to consider -- Lynn
Rooney, the Asst. District Attorney, began an
impassioned address on the case and Gerald's crimes, as
well as on the testimony of the children, which she now
recited in some detail.
Here again was the magic room in which Gerald attacked
the small victims while disguised as a clown; the story
about Violet Amirault terrorizing children with threats
that they would never see their parents again if they
told; another darkly meandering one about Violet
selecting certain children to be left behind while
others went on field trips, and how she had taken
children from one classroom and put them in another. The
families had suffered greatly, the children were prone
to obsessive compulsive disorders, the Asst. DA argued,
and they needed closure. Above all, Gerald Amirault had
not even confessed to the crimes that had ravaged their
lives. If there were some acknowledgment that he
committed the crimes, the Asst. DA maintained, "the
parents could begin to process this event."
Board member John Kivlan brought Asst. DA Rooney back to
the issue at hand -- the question of the different
treatment for the same crimes. Had the DA not agreed,
last October, to revise and revoke Cheryl's sentence?
And if that was the case, why should Gerald not be
treated the same, the questioner wanted to know.
Gerald had been the ringleader in the crimes, the Asst.
DA responded. The number of Gerald's crimes was greater.
He would pose a danger if freed, whereas Cheryl had
proven her reliability, since being freed, by committing
no new offenses.
Mr. Kivlan pointed out that Gerald had also proven
himself when he stayed free on bail without incident, in
the two years he spent awaiting trial. And weren't the
crimes charged to Violet and Cheryl the same as those
Gerald was accused of committing? Mr. Kivlan, a former
prosecutor, pressed relentlessly for answers. If it had
been right to make the agreement freeing Cheryl so that
the families could have some sense of closure, as the
Asst. DA argued now, why wouldn't they be interested in
closure in Gerald's case?
To all this, Ms. Rooney responded with further details
of the suffering Gerald had inflicted, of the needs of
the families and the children. This emphasis may have
moved Board member and former prosecutor Maureen Walsh
to ask gently whether -- in addition to the families'
needs -- society's concern for justice might also be
important.
The Asst. DA did not have an easy time, all told. None
of the prosecutors who had tried and convicted the
Amiraults was present today, nor anyone else from the
current DA's office -- absences that said a good deal
about the attractions of being identified with this
case.
The argument that Gerald was the ringleader who had
committed the most terrible offenses was nowhere borne
out in the records. These, filed by the then DA Scott
Harshbarger, who brought the case, described the crimes
alleged against Violet and Cheryl and Gerald in
identical language, and emphasized that there were no
mitigating circumstances to explain the acts of these
perpetrators.
Finally, the Fells Acres parents came before the Board
to attest to the anguish they had endured as a result of
the crimes. As ever, they asked that the press not
reveal their identities. The parents all declared that
they lived with the results of the Amiraults' crimes
every day, and that nothing could atone for these
crimes. One told the Board, with passion, that in her
view Gerald never should be free, that a life sentence
would have been appropriate. No therapy would ever be
enough, another said, to undo the effects of the
Amirault's crimes. Clearly for them, Gerald Amirault's
lengthy sentence was the confirmation of their case --
the proof of the charges and the confirmation of their
suffering.
Finally, the former Fells Acres pupil came forward,
flanked by her parents. A massively overweight woman,
she described, tearfully, the problems afflicting her as
a result of her victimization -- which included, she
said, her weight problem. Unable to control her
trembling, she asked, fervently, that Gerald's
commutation petition be rejected.
There could be no doubting the parents' conviction that
their children had been violated and tortured in a magic
room, terrorized by their teachers. Nor could there be
doubt of the former child witness's certainty that she
had endured unspeakable horrors at her preschool, and
been sexually assaulted -- a belief now the defining
fact of her life and identity. The grievous results of
prosecutions like the one that swept the Amiraults off
to their ruin came in many forms.
When the proceedings were over, the Amirault family
filed out, spent, to await the decision that represented
the last real hope for Gerald's freedom. To be sure,
there isn't much in the statistics to encourage hope.
Between 1988 and 1997, there were 270 petitions for
commutation, of which just seven were granted. The
recommendation of the Board of Pardons is expected
within the next several weeks.
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