Amirault's commutation would close chapter of '80s spate of child-abuse prosecutions

The Fells Acres Day School child-abuse case is the last of more than 30 such prosecutions from the 1980s, most of the others formally discredited, in which an accused person remains in jail.

If Gerald "Tooky" Amirault gains his freedom as a result of yesterday's state Parole Board recommendation, experts say, it will be a welcome outcome for a case fraught with legal procedures - chief among them the relentless and suggestive questioning of preschool children - that have been shunned by courts for a decade.

"These were all career-making cases for the prosecutors, brought about in an atmosphere of parental hysteria and big headlines instead of dispassion and prosecutorial integrity," said Kimberly Hart, executive director of the National Child Abuse Defense Resource Center in Philadelphia.

"All the while, in the background," she said, "groundbreaking scientific research was under way on the suggestibility of child witnesses, how they could be led to believe in things that had not happened. But when all that data came out, prosecutors could not admit how wrong they had gone."

As the Parole Board noted in its 5-0 decision yesterday (with one abstention), pardoning Amirault, 46, is not merely about guaranteeing him the same technical rights as those granted his already-paroled sister, Cheryl Amirault LeFave, 48. The board went further, stating that "real and substantial doubt exists" over Amirault's 1986 conviction.

The board cited the lack of physical evidence of child abuse and the flawed interview techniques used by Middlesex County prosecutors and investigators. It wrote: "These and like flaws in the investigative procedures in similar cases elsewhere in the nation have since led to the discrediting of some of those convictions."

The litany of discredited episodes into which the Fells Acres case could fall is indeed long and harrowing, even to those who make prosecuting real abuse a life's work. Historians are already asking what combination of fear and frenzy had law enforcement and the public so convinced day-care centers from coast to coast were freakish havens for molesters.
(...)

"This was all very ideological," explained Jack Levin, professor of criminology at Northeastern University. "It wasn't based on research, but on this burning desire to 'protect' children from abuse.

"One of the mottos of the day was that kids don't lie about sexual abuse. That wasn't based on data or research but on ideology. It was an absolute statement that was bound to be disproven. When you make statements like that, you set yourself up for defeat."
[...more...] [Need the full story? Read this]