President Obama, in order to keep intact as much of his Health Care support as possible, is actively campaigning to elect Massachusetts Attorney General, Martha Coakley to the U.S. Senate seat.
Not only was she part of the crusade that left the lives of dozens of innocent families in smoldering wreckage, she has defended and re-defended her participation.
Gerald, Violet, and Cheryl Amirault who operated the Fells Acre Day Care Center in Malden, Massachusetts, were accused of child sex abuse in 1984 and were then prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms. One of the prosecutors in the case, Scott Harshbarger, riding the wave of publicity created by the sensational crusade was eventually elected Massachusettes Attorney General.
As in almost all of the day care hysteria cases of the 80s and 90s, the magnitude of the travesty of justice only became stunningly obvious when the children’s interview tapes, virtually the only evidence against the Amiraults, were examined. As the legitimacy of the convictions was increasingly called into question, prosecutors dug in their heals and fought, tooth and nail, to keep the Amiraults in prison even as their case disintegrated before their eyes.
By the time Coakley arrived on the scene in 1999, this process was well underway with even the media and public siding with the defendants. As the pressure mounted and it seemed likely the Gerald Amirault would be released, Coakley agressively campaigned against him, ultimately delaying his release until 2004.
While, in the public mind (as well as the minds of many legal authorities involved in the case) the prosecutions were clearly bogus, Coakley and many of the other prosecutors in this and other cases still maintain that the defendants were guilty rather than admit an error that could possibly impact their precious careers. It’s enough that these cold blooded monsters are still employed without their being even further rewarded with the personal attentions of a U.S. President to help them get elected simply to hang onto a senate seat.
Coakley, coming in when she did, shared none of the blame for the original prosecutions. She, more than anyone else, had the opportunity to turn the ship around and restore some semblance of sanity to state’s behavior. She also had the benefit of knowing that similar cases all over the country were being exposed for the witch hunts that the were. Nonetheless, Coakley aggressively continued to torture the Amiraults rather than do anything that might be conceived as backing down. Coakley was too busy thinking about Coakley and her climb toward the Attorney General’s office to put an end to the train year wreck that began 15 years earlier when some over-zealous prosecutors saw Fells Acres as a chance at fame and glory.
If anything stands out about the day care sex abuse cases, it’s the absolute absurdity of so-called evidence that interviewers supposedly teased out of the children even after they repeatedly tried to tell investigators that nothing happened. No one in the prosecutors office who had access to those tapes can be excused from responsibility for the assassination of those innocent people.
Credit goes to Radley Balko at theagitator.com which is where I first learned about the connection between Coakley and the Fell Acres witch hunt and found the link to the excellent Wall Street Journal article.