Abusive justice: the child-abuse craze has passed from the media spotlight. But many innocent people are still fighting for their lives

As Dr. Richard Gardner has pointed out, the dolls, with their dis- proportionately large genitals, are a terrible contaminant. Notes Gardner: "If one gives a child a peg and a hole, the child is going to put the peg in the hole. . . . Give a child one of these female anatomical dolls with wide open mouth, anus, and vagina; the child will inevitably place one or more fingers in one of these conspicuous orifices. For many of these workers, such an act is 'proof' that the child has indeed been sexually abused."

Although Leslie was not even able to identify Snowden in court, the judge surmounted this problem by permitting two other children to testify he had abused them (one was Greg Wilkes, now sufficiently coached; the second, another Braga product). But the judge forbade testimony about Snowden's exemplary record or that the Wilkes charges had been thrown out earlier or that Snowden had been tried and the jury had come in with a verdict of "not guilty" in the Banks case. The judge permitted the prosecutor's medical expert to introduce testimony that Leslie had tested positive for garderella vaginitis but refused to allow the defense medical expert, Dr. Max Bertholf, to point out that the test used was a sloppy one, at best no more than 50 per cent accurate. The jury was not even allowed to hear that the prosecution's doctor had herself now discarded the test because of its inaccuracy.

And so it went. When Leslie partly recanted under insistent questioning by Snowden's attorney, Joseph Braga took the stand to accuse the attorney of child abuse and to explain that such withdrawals were "typical" of abused children. Here indeed was a no-win situation -- if the child accused the defendant, he was guilty, and if the child recanted, it was further evidence he was guilty.

Despite the egregious errors in the trial, appeals courts have turned a deaf ear. In 1989 the Florida Court of Appeal agreed to "comment" only on the issue of whether Snowden had in effect wound up being convicted for what he sup- posedly did to the other two children, when he was not on trial for abusing them. The court solemnly concluded that "less than one-half of the witnesses and only one-third of the testimony" were devoted to them. By the mid 1990s Snowden had exhausted all possibility of appeal in state courts; Rosenthal, along with attorney Arthur Cohen, is now seeking to win a hearing in federal court. The Florida attorney general has already moved three times to strike their brief, on the ground that they are procedurally barred from raising each and every issue.

OUTRAGEOUS as the Snowden case is, it was not Janet Reno's worst child-sex-abuse prosecution. That accolade goes to her most famous case, known as Country Walk, after the upscale suburban-Miami development in which it unfolded. This time day care was provided by newlywed 17-year-old Ileana Fuster, seeking to supplement the income of her 36-year-old husband Frank's decorating business. There was a mother's suspicion to light the fuse: picking up her 18-month-old, awakened from sleep and groggy, the mother decided he had been drugged. And there were the Bragas to elicit the requisite charges from 2- to 4-year-olds. (The oldest child was 5.) Sample: "They'd pee in something, put slime in it, put punch in, mix it up, put caca and turtle skins in, and everybody would drink it."