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

Rael Jean Isaac

ON January 14, two hundred people gathered in Salem, Massachusetts, to com- memorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the Day of Contrition, a day of fasting and remorse proclaimed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the public hysteria and judicial misconduct that had led to "great hardship brought upon innocent persons" in what have come to be known as the Salem witch trials. Among those present were many of the chief participants in the struggle against their modern variant, the child-sex-abuse persecutions of the 1980s and 1990s, most of which have included charges of Satanic ritual.

In addition to the pioneering researchers on the suggestibility of children and a handful of journalists who had kept their heads while their colleagues wallowed in sensation, there were the victims themselves. Kelly Michaels was there, the young would-be actress who served 5 years of a 47-year sentence on patently ridiculous charges of sexually molesting virtually all the 3- to 5-year-olds at the Wee Care Day Nursery unnoticed by any of her fellow workers. A prize moment from the trial: a child describes being forced to push a sword into Miss Michaels's rectum and being politely told "thank you" when he pulls it out. Also present were Peggy Ann and Ray Buckey, accused in the McMartin case, the costliest criminal trial in U.S. history; Pastor Roberson and his wife, who supposedly turned their Baptist church in Wenatchee, Washington, into a site for mass sex orgies; Brenda and Scott Kniffen, who were each sentenced to 240 years in prison (and served 14 before their sentences were overturned) for participating in a nonexistent sex ring in Bakersfield, California; Violet and Cheryl Amirault, the mother and daughter who ran the Fells Acre nursery in Massachusetts, free after 7 years in prison, their sentences tossed out by an appeals-court judge.

While the presence in Salem of victims in some of the most high-profile cases suggested that the legal system was finally working, what their presence really pointed up was an anomaly: while appeals courts were throwing out the convictions of some of those unjustly imprisoned, they were arbitrarily deny- ing so much as a hearing to others. Indeed, many were sinking ever deeper into the legal quagmire of their multiple life sentences.

Take the case of police officer Grant Snowden, North Miami Officer of the Year in 1983, who has now served 11 years of his five life sentences. He is one of several victims of false prosecutions for child sexual abuse ruthlessly pressed by Janet Reno when she was Dade County District Attorney, prosecutions which catapulted her from obscurity into a national champion of children.

Snowden's ordeal began in the summer of 1984. His wife, Janice, had provided day care in their home for 15 years. She became concerned when 3-year-old Greg Wilkes, whom she had cared for since he was an infant, arrived at the house several times with welts that suggested he had been beaten. (Greg Wilkes and all the other names of children used here are the pseudonyms employed in the court records to protect the children's identity.) Snowden confronted the parents, telling them he would report them to the child-welfare authorities if Greg appeared like that again. Greg's vengeful father struck first, accusing Snowden of sexually molesting the child.

In the end, even Miss Reno did not have the stomach to press charges in this case. The father's manipulation of his son was so blatant that the psychiatrist who examined Greg warned his father to stop pressuring him to say things he did not want to say, and the case was dropped. But this only spurred the DA's office to greater efforts. With frantic parents now questioning children, a potential new complainant was found, 11-year-old Carol Banks, who claimed to have "recovered" memories of abuse at the Snowden home seven years earlier. Janet Reno brought in the heavy guns in the form of self-styled child-abuse experts Laurie and Joseph Braga (she had a PhD in speech, he in education). After a Braga interview had elicited a variety of charges from Carol, the prosecution felt ready to proceed to trial, but, as it turned out, miscalculated. Snowden was acquitted on all charges.

Undeterred, Miss Reno's office made good on a promise made to Snowden during the trial -- to try him one child at a time until there was a conviction. On round three, the prosecution scored. This time there were two alleged victims, 4-year-old Leslie Blands and her 6-month-old brother. The case rested on Les- lie's allegations. Yet New York attorney Robert Rosenthal points out in his brief seeking to overturn Snowden's conviction, "every single sexual comment and allegation made by Leslie was first suggested to her by Braga." This can be determined because the Bragas, like many of the early sex-abuse therapists proud of their techniques, videotaped their interviews.

The videotapes make plain that the Bragas used what analysts of these therapists' methods define as the standard techniques: repeated questioning in interview after interview when initial efforts receive the usual, "Nothing happened"; seeking only confirming evidence, avoiding paths that produce nega- tive or inconsistent statements; setting an emotional tone in which parents and therapists will be proud if the child "helps," i.e., "tells"; asking the child to "pretend," then tell "what really happened," and then to "pretend" again until the child is totally confused; telling a child of allegations made by "other" children; and using so-called anatomically detailed dolls.

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."

But what makes Rosenthal call this case "the worst I have ever seen" is the brutality with which Miss Reno's office wrested a confession from Ileana Fuster, scarcely more than a child herself. In a sworn deposition, Stephen Dinerstein, the experienced investigator employed by the Fusters' attorneys, described the conditions in which Ileana was held and their effect on her. She had been a bright, attractive girl with shiny black hair; now she "appeared as if she was 50 years old. Her skin was drawn from a large loss of weight. . . . She has sores and infections on her skin and states that no sanitary condi- tions exist or are provided, that the shower, when received, is a hosing down in the cell. That she is in a cell with nothing in it but a light in the ceil- ing and that she is often kept nude and in view of everybody and anybody." As a result of her mistreatment, said Dinerstein, she had become "a constantly crying, shaking, tormented person who understands little if anything about the whole process and is now being threatened and promised and is totally in a state of confusion to the point of not having the slightest idea as to month and date."

None of this could have been lost on Miss Reno, for she repeatedly visited Ileana Fuster. Dinerstein reports that during the last two weeks of July 1985 (after 11 months, most of it in solitary confinement) "Mrs. Fuster's condition had deteriorated so badly she could hardly move and was very slow to respond to any questions. When asked if Mr. Van Zamft [her attorney] was present, she could not even recall, but said simply that the woman State Attorney [Reno] was very big and very scary and made suggestions as to problems that would arise if she didn't cooperate." How often Janet Reno personally came to apply the screws is uncertain. But whatever their number, those visits appall Robert Rosenthal. "I never heard of that before. I can't imagine that any state offi- cial should be coming to visit inmates, especially a weak young woman defendant in isolation, half the time medicated, her sleep cycles altered, hypnotized [by Michael Rappaport and Merry Lou Haber]." These were psychologists employed by Ileana's own attorney (who wanted her to plea bargain) to help her "recover" memories of abuse. To compound the psychologi- cal torture, people from Reno's office took her on rare trips to good Spanish restaurants to remind her of what life could be like if she cooperated.

Despite all the pressures upon her, Ileana steadfastly maintained her own and Frank's innocence for 11 months. But in the summer of 1985 she cracked. Wedged between Michael Rappaport and Janet Reno, whose hand she clutched, Ileana gave her deposition. What the children had said, she now testified, was true and then some: Frank had hung his own 6-year-old son, Noel, by the feet in the garage and twisted him like a punching bag; hung her up by her arms in the same garage; spread feces on her; forced her to perform sexual acts on the children at knifepoint; put snakes in her genitals and those of the children; and stuck a cross in her rectum. Reno assistant John Hogan, who prosecuted the case in the courtroom, described these and the other charges to the jury as "unimaginable acts" when they were, in point of fact, imaginary acts.

As the reward for her cooperation, Ileana was sentenced to 10 years and after 3 was released and deported to Honduras. Frank was sentenced to six life terms plus 165 years.

Although Frank's appeals went nowhere, he almost won his freedom in 1995. Ileana gave a sworn 60-page deposition to attorney Arthur Cohen in Honduras, detailing the methods that had been used to coerce her into making a false confession. But now, said Ileana, ten years had gone by, her mind was clear, and she knew there had never been any abuse of children in her home. "I have no memories of that [abusing the children] because nothing really happened."

Since Ileana refused to come back to the United States (a vindictive DA's office would have tried her for perjury for lying under oath at the first trial), Rosenthal and Cohen persuaded the judge to allow her to testify over satellite from Honduras. But within days of the scheduled hearing, Ileana had retracted her retraction via a letter to the Miami Herald. The bottom line was that she wanted to let her original deposition stand and wanted Frank's attorneys "to leave me alone, please."

What had happened? Rosenthal believes she was threatened by someone determined that Country Walk not unravel, and is sure she did not write the letter she signed.

But whatever happened, the door had now shut fast on Frank Fuster. According to Cohen and Rosenthal, his hopes for successful appeal are now all but lost. And while Fuster does not have Snowden's exemplary background (Fuster had served four years in New York for killing a man in a traffic dispute and at the time of Country Walk was on probation for touching a 9-year-old girl on the breast through her clothing) both men are imprisoned till death for crimes that not only did they not commit, but that never happened.

That some of those falsely accused go free, their sentences finally reversed on appeal, and others remain to serve out life terms often constitutes no more than a legal lottery. People v. Stoll is a famous case and the term "Stoll's evidence" is now used to refer to the California Supreme Court's recognition of the right of those accused of bizarre sexual acts against children to introduce expert psychological evidence, including the results of recognized tests, as evidence that they do not fit the profile of sexual deviants. Most people who have heard of the case assume that Stoll won his freedom with it, but in fact, because of a technicality, it was the sentences of his two co-defendants, Timothy Palomo and Margie Grafton, that were overturned. Fourteen years into his life sentence, Stoll remains incarcerated. Now married, Grafton and Palomo are reunited with Margie Grafton's children, whose testimony had been key in convicting them.

OF all the genuine child abuse in these cases -- committed by therapists, prosecutors, and families who manipulate children to bear false witness -- none compares to the coercion of small children to testify against their parents, often with the false promise that as soon as they have told the therapists what they want to hear, they will be reunited with their family. Donna Hubbard's 9-year-old son Richie was coerced into testifying against her in the same Kern County hysteria over alleged interlocking Satanic sex rings that swallowed up Grafton, Palomo, and Stoll. He says that it was not until he was a teenager, cared for by a foster family who loved him, that he realized "my mom was in prison and I did it."

Sometimes the ordeal is not over even when it seems finally, mercifully, to be at an end. In April of this year the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overruled the appellate judge, reinstating the convictions of Violet and Cheryl Amirault in the interests of achieving "finality." For Violet Amirault, at 74, prison would be finality indeed. (There has been a last-minute stay of execution. The Superior Court judge who was expected to carry out the decision of the Supreme Judicial Court instead defiantly ordered a new trial. Stay tuned via the Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz, who brought the Amiraults to national attention -- including Violet's son Gerald who is still in jail.)

Apparently finality is a virtue only when it incarcerates. Prosecutors have been unwilling to close the door on the case that has made Edenton, North Carolina, internationally infamous, thanks to Ofra Bikel's brilliant documentaries on PBS's Frontline. In 1995, the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the appellate decision that threw out the convictions of Little Rascals Day Care owner Robert Kelly (12 consecutive life sentences) and cook Dawn Wil- son (merely one life sentence), the only two of the "Edenton 7" actually to go before a jury. (Sample allegations by the children: they were taken aboard a space ship and abused in outer space; "Mr Bob" [Kelly] killed babies with a gun; abused on a ship while trained sharks swam around the boat.) But in a case of vindictive prosecution, Assistant DA Nancy Lamb has conjured up a new, previously unknown supposed victim of Kelly's and is now pressing forward. Bob Kelly has shown amazing grace through this ordeal. After six years in prison, he has lost everything, but still tithes his small salary as a telephone maintenance man.

Still, Kelly has been comparatively fortunate in that his case attracted international attention, forcing the appellate court to examine it closely. The same appeals court upheld the three consecutive life sentences of Patrick Figured, whose trial, held without fanfare, had been contemporaneous with that of Kelly. Yet public appellate defender Mark Montgomery, who represented both men, says that legally the case was even worse than Kelly's. Once the therapists were through with them, the children insisted "Pat" forced the dog to urinate and made them drink it, thrust candles and screwdrivers up their rectums, forced them to perform oral sex, and burned a Bible in a barrel while dressed up like the devil. Co-workers testified that Figured worked eight-to-five as a manufacturing manager at a job an hour's drive away from the day care center and was never absent from the office except for a lunch break. He would have had to fly on a broom to be present on some of the occa- sions when he was accused of inflicting his laundry list of Satanic crimes.

How many innocent people are currently serving long, often life sentences for sexual abuse of children? The situation in North Carolina suggests a sig- nificant national problem. Montgomery says that for the last ten years he has been almost exclusively engaged in appeals in sexual-abuse cases, around 250 in all. Asked how many of those convicted were innocent, Montgomery said he was unable to say. What he could say was that most trials were so poorly con- ducted, and the defendant's ability to mount a defense so limited, that an objective reader of the transcripts would say at the end of it, "Well, this guy might have done it, but we sure wouldn't know it from the trial."

Nor, after 14 years, is there any end in sight. Few people realize in how short a span the Salem witch hysteria flamed and then burnt itself out. It began in January 1692 when two girls began acting strangely and babbling incoherently; the trials started in March; the executions began in June (19 "witches" were hung and an additional victim pressed to death by rocks); in October the governor forbade further imprisonments for witchcraft. It was all over in 10 months -- 16 months if one postpones closure until the governor's order to release all accused "witches" remaining in jail. While the big Satanic-ritual-abuse cases are on the wane, the small cases march on, with the legal system showing little ability to separate valid from spurious claims.

In one very important respect, the situation has grown worse. Since medical evidence is usually either wholly absent or ambiguous, the cases ultimately rest on the testimony of children, often very small children. It thus becomes crucial to determine where that testimony comes from: Is the source the child or the therapist? Only if the therapist's interviews with the child are taped is it possible to tell. But precisely because videotapes have been vital to the defense, many prosecutors now seek to avoid them. At the trial of Patrick Figured psychologists Mark Everson and Barbara Boat both testified that the attorney general's office had "encouraged" them not to tape their interviews with the children. Wenatchee investigators actually destroyed their notes.

For many the only hope for relief may lie in a governor's pardon. But governors are not going to act without public support. There has been no modern-day William Phips, the Massachusetts Bay Colony governor who emptied the jails of "witches." Terrified of being perceived as soft on child abuse, not a single governor has pardoned a single individual in any of these cases. The most any has done is try to pass the buck. In 1996, then-Governor Mike Lowry of Washington asked Janet Reno for a Justice Department investigation of civil-rights violations in Wenatchee, a ludicrous proposition given Miss Reno's record. (Needless to say, she refused to get involved.)

It is of vital concern to everyone that our legal system not be corrupted by systematic injustice. But thus far, these cases constitute a reverse morality tale. The innocent languish in prison while those who put them there prosper. Scott Harshbarger, prosecutor of the Amiraults, went on to become Mas- sachusetts attorney general. And none have done as well as the prosecutors of Country Walk. Janet Reno rode her triumph in that case to become U.S. attorney general. John Hogan, who helped prosecute Country Walk, was rewarded with a plum newly created job as statewide prosecutor. In less than a year he was forced to resign when it transpired that he had bought "hot suits" from a man who was fencing men's clothing for a fourth the normal price from a private residence -- all cash and no sales tax, making Hogan an unlikely "innocent victim," as he portrayed himself. Miss Reno then took her right-hand man back, and later brought him to Washington, where he currently serves as chief of staff at the Justice Department.

But if the wrongdoers have flourished, the American public has indirectly paid a heavy price. Within weeks of assuming her post, Janet Reno ordered the tanks into Waco, her decision, by her own account, precipitated by two words: "child abuse." Someone had told her the Branch Davidians were beating children, and although the FBI would later acknowledge the report was false, Miss Reno had not paused to inquire further. Among the 79 who died there, 25 were children. And Timothy McVeigh was obsessed with avenging Waco.

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