Suffer The Little Children

The Eighties and Nineties saw a frenzy of prosecutions across the country of day care center operators accused of sexually abusing children in their care, the most infamous being the McMartin family of Manhattan Beach, California. In a 2003 book I just ran across in a thrift store, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times, reporter Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal delves into a handful of cases where caring, upright citizens had their lives destroyed by an unholy trinity of DA’s eager for conviction, sympathetic courts and dubious “abuse investigators” paraded before juries as expert witnesses on the weasel-word subject of “repressed memory syndrome”.

The title is from a quote by Montesquieu, to wit,

There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.

Neither are the “terrors” of the subtitle hyperbole by a book publisher anxious to ring up quick sales: Rabinowitz eloquently conveys the Kafkaesque nightmare that enveloped defendants Violet Amirault, her daughter Cheryl, son Gerald, and — in a separate unrelated case — police officer Grant Snowden, who overnight found themselves accused of unspeakable acts of molestation, rape, animal cruelty and exploitation of small children and turned into pariahs by the communities where they had worked their entire lives to build stainless reputations and careers.

What is most terrifying for the casual reader, is the unstoppable juggernaut created when the news media, government and mere “therapists” holding Ph.D’s combine to railroad ordinary people into prison in highly publicized trials where the principles of presumed innocence, the right to face your accusers and the rules of evidence are thrown out the window. Rabinowitz chillingly and methodically shows how prosecutorial zeal, the power of the title “expert” and, finally, peer pressure in the community drove rational, educated parents to doubt their own best judgment and experience, and accept defamations hurled on the accused without a shred of physical evidence.

The children involved were no less victims of abuse by the justice system than were the Amiraults and Snowden. Toddlers, who play make-believe and talk to their teddy bears, were subjected to hours, often days of interrogation by nurses and “abuse investigators” who finally succeeded in wearing some down to the point where they would testify in open court to outrageous charges of sexual abuse by the “monsters” running the daycare centers to they attended. (As one appellate judge pondered when some sanity was finally brought to bear on the Amirault case, Why would children, if actually subjected to the horrors the investigators and DA’s were arguing, eagerly look forward to returning to such a torture chamber, as even their parents were forced to admit?).

Rabinowitz also heartrendingly chronicles the misplaced hope and faith of the defendants that the absurdity of the charges leveled against them would “clear itself up” in a day or two and they could return to their normal, productive, pretrial lives, hopes brutally dashed as the insanity unfolded:

• Gerald Amirault was convicted in 1986 and spent the next 18 years in prison before finally being released in 2004.
• Daycare operator Violet Amirault and her daughter Cheryl were sentenced in 1987 and, after serving 8 years, freed on appeal (soon voided and their 20-to-40-year prison terms reinstated). Violet sadly died of cancer awaiting the outcome of her appeal, while Cheryl would not be released until 1999.
• Grant Snowden was a dedicated police officer with a spotless record, a cop who felt called upon to root out the “bad guys” in society, yet spent 12 years killing rats in the Florida penal colony, convicted of “touching” his 5-month-old stepdaughter who was eventually coaxed into testifying against him as a teen by the usual phalanx of courtroom “experts”, their livelihoods dependent on sending someone — anyone — to prison.

It’s instructive — and infinitely illuminating of human character — to recall that the Amiraults’ wrongful convictions and imprisonment took place in Massachusetts, site of the Salem witchcraft trials in the 17th century, when courts and a polite society above reproach sent scores of innocents to the gallows based on the “undeniable truth” they were supernatural ogres that traveled by broomstick.