Archive for the ‘Day Case Sex Abuse Cases’ Category

Lorain Ohio’s legacy of cruelty and injustice

Monday, February 14th, 2011

While most people think the child sex abuse panic of the 80′s and 90s is behind us, there are still people suffering in prison because of it.  The case of Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen of Lorain County, Ohio is a prime example of how lives were destroyed by ambitious prosecutors and incompetent judges incapable of delivering justice when accusations of child sex abuse were involved.

But what really sets up the Lorain, Ohio case as a crowning achievement of justice gone completely off the tracks is the fact that, after the sentence of these two was thrown out in 2009, they are now headed back to prison because the Ohio Supreme Court reversed that two year old decision last month.

Read the entire article and you will have a pretty clear picture of what was happening all over the country in the 80s and 90s but to see the same cruelty repeated twenty years later is a travesty.  It’s incredible that current child sex abuse paranoia in this country isn’t met with more skepticism in the wake of the witch hunts that destroyed so many lives and families over those two decades.

When faced with any activity or proposal that is justified by claims of “protecting children”, the entire population of the U.S. suddenly gets gullible and stupid.   And it’s for that very reason that nearly all moral crusades are presented in those terms.    Sex offender registries are justified by the fear of pedophiles behind every tree and anti-prostitution groups try to convince the public that hundreds of thousands of children in the U.S. are being forced to be sex slaves.  And it works.  The media repeats it without a hint of skepticism, politicians exploit it to get headlines, and the public swallows it whole.

I guess I should stop referring to it as “the sex abuse panic of the 80s and 90s” because it didn’t end in the 90s.  It’s still going as strong as ever.


Posted in Day Case Sex Abuse Cases, Ohio, Prosecutorial Misconduct | 1 Comment »

More victims of the sex 80s and 90s hysteria

Monday, February 14th, 2011

This case fits in perfectly with the day care sex abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s.  In 1994, four women were accused of molesting two young sisters ages 7 and 9, convicted, and sentenced to decades in prison, but on closer examination, these convictions are yet another monument to the lynch mob mentality typical of a public that imagines sex criminals hiding behind every tree.

The case was largely decided on the testimony of pediatrician and child advocate Nancy Kellogg who immediately suspected the case was a satanic abuse case after examining the victims when the accusations were made, two months after the incident occurred.  By the mid 1990′s the impossible claims made during the satanic ritual abuse panic were already being discredited wholesale, but that didn’t stop Ms Kellogg from proceeding with this case.

Kellogg’s theory of Satanic ritual abuse was not directly presented to the jury, but the language of Prosecutor Philip Kazen certainly seemed to be tying the case to teh notoriety of the nationwide day care cases:

“We’re going to ask you,” Kazen told jurors, “to believe a 9-year-old little girl who was sacrificed on the altar of lust.”

Typical of other sex abuse cases or the era, teh case was aggressively prosecuted and guilty verdicts were reached despite the ample room for doubt.  The first warning sign was the fact that pediatrician Kellogg was pushing the Satanic ritual abuse angle in spite of its having been discredited.  Secondly, the children’s stories were perpetually changing.  Physical medical evidence was hardly conclusive.  The two girls had a history of making rape accusations.

Typical of innocent people, the four women rejected plea deals, opting to go to trial.   There is little comment from the actors in the ordeal.  Reviving this case won’t doing them any good.

Two advocacy groups, the Lubbock-based Innocence Project of Texas, or IPOT, and the National Center for Reason and Justice in New York, or NCRJ, have taken up the women’s case.

Let’s wish them luck.  The child sex abuse witch hunts of the 80s and 90s are proof of the utter cruelty people are capable of when given an excuse.  The fact that there are still victims of that crusade of languishing in prison is an example of the indiscriminate destruction that can be wrought under the mantra of “protecting children”.

Posted in Child Molestation, Day Case Sex Abuse Cases, Prosecutorial Misconduct, Texas | 2 Comments »

Residual suffering from a past moral panic: recovered memories

Saturday, September 25th, 2010

“My Lie: A True Story of False Memory“ is a new book by Meredith Maran that describes how she was caught up in the recovered memory hysteria of the 80s and 90s.  Recovered memory syndrome has now been almost universally disgraced as being a disease created by the cure.  It was a widespread belief that children who are sexually abused commonly repress the memories of it, only to have them reemerge later in life.  This hysteria paralleled another well known witch hunt of the era as criminal justice journalist Steve Weinberg reports:

As researchers like me are painfully aware and as Maran discusses in her memoir, a variation of recovered memory accusations played out in day care centers and similar preschool locales, where adults abetted children in revealing alleged sex abuse rings.

Hundreds of child care workers and others in cities across the nation – with Bakersfield as a prominent example – ended up in prison for supposedly abusing countless preschoolers in fantastical ways.

Social workers, police detectives, psychologists, psychiatrists, prosecutors, jurors and judges became complicit in the mass hysteria that led to the wrongful convictions.

It would be hard to find another phase in American history where mass hysteria marching under the flag of saving children laid waste so many innocent lives.  Like so many crusades, the goal was to win at all costs. The ends justified the means.  This site dedicates a page solely to that era and its cast of characters.

Since those days, exploiting people’s emotional compassion for children has become the preferred strategy to justify new legislation, restrictions on freedom, censorship, higher taxes, and greater regulation.   Politicians invoke child danger scares to gain votes, news outlets capitalize on it to attract viewers, and nonprofit as well as governmental organizations pump it up it to justify more funding.

Saving children is big business.

Posted in Books, Child Molestation, Day Case Sex Abuse Cases, Hall of Shame, Paranoia, Prosecutorial Misconduct, Recovered Memory Syndrome | Comments Off

The Hall of Shame welcomes Kee McFarlane!

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Kee McFarlane was a key player in the crusade accusing the operators  of the  McMartin Preschool in Los Angeles County California with hundreds of counts of child sex abuse.   As a social worker and psychotherapist wannabe with the Childrens Institute International, she and her associates interviewed some 400 children in the McMartin Preschool case.  Her refusal to believe the children’s denials along with the application of intense goading and intimidation techniques ultimately led to claims that 360 children had been molested.   After a seven year trial, purported to be the most expensive in U.S. history at $15 million,  not a single conviction was handed down by the jury.    Characteristic of almost all the day care sex abuse cases of that period, the rabid ambitions of  incompetent witch hunters like Kee McFarlane utterly destroyed entire families without suffering so much as a scratch to themselves.

Welcome to the Sex Hysteria Hall of Shame, Kee.

Posted in California, Child Molestation, Child Rape, Day Case Sex Abuse Cases, Persecution, Rights of the Accused, United States | Comments Off

A Who’s Who of Child Sex Abuse Witch Hunters

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

I am launching a page dedicated specifically to identifying those prosecutors, law enforcement, and social services workers whose enthusiastic participation in the child sex abuse panic of the 80s and 90s victimized so many innocent people.

It would be impossible to shine too bright a light on that tragic episode in American history and, while we often hear about the events, we don’t often enough understand that the perpetrators of that evil were not simply an anonymous mob, but are real living people with faces and names living among us.

You can think of it as a registry for abusers of the innocent.  For those who remember these cases as  the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic, you can think of these people as Satan’s Servants, because if Satan played any role in these cases at all, it was most certainly on the side of the prosecution.

The Witch Hunter Honor Roll

Posted in Day Case Sex Abuse Cases, Paranoia, Persecution, Rights of the Accused, United States | Comments Off

Obama Campaigns to elect Day Care Sex Abuse Witch Hunter to Ted Kenndy’s vacant Senate seat

Friday, January 15th, 2010

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.

Posted in Child Molestation, Child Rape, Day Case Sex Abuse Cases, Massachusetts, United States | Comments Off