Today it’s school teacher Tonya Craft on trial in Georgia for supposedly molesting young girls at her home. Yesteryear it was the cases of Gerald Amirault in Massachusetts, Margaret Kelly Michaels in New Jersey, Debbie and Alvin McCuan in Kern County, California, and Raymond Buckey and Peggy McMartin in Manhattan Beach, California. When are law enforcement and prosecutors going to learn that if you interrogate young children over and over and over again that eventually they will answer your leading questions the way that you think the interrogator wants them to be answered?
Some years ago, I was court appointed defense investigator in the case of a retired deputy sheriff on a so-called “repressed memory” case that was filed something like 25 years after the purported molestation of his former step-daughter. The so-called victim was so nutty that she’d been repeatedly in lock up psychiatric facilities, at least once in a catatonic state. Her room mates were convicted felons (who naturally were not exactly disposed to like a retired sheriff who came from a fourth generation family of deputies: his father, son and grandson were also deputies). Because the case was so old, and because California and Los Angeles county don’t give court appointed private investigators access to locating data bases that they do allow law enforcement and public defender investigators to use, the court appointed lawyer eventually had to plead the client guilty because the court wouldn’t give us reasonable continuances to find witnesses.
When the case came up for sentencing, the “victim’s” treating psychologist demonstrated just how bizarre the prosecution’s case really was. The psychologist broke down crying on the witness stand, testifying about how it had been necessary for him “to bond with my patient” to get through the trauma of the repressed memories of her molestation. He testified that he had convinced her to report the purported molestation to law enforcement. Every psychologist I’ve ever described this too pointed out to me that (a) for the psychologist to claim to have “bonded” with the patient was unprofessional at a minimum and (b) his having urged her to bring criminal charges against somebody was both unprofessional and unethical on its face. His having broken down crying on the witness stand rose to the level of mondo bizarro.
Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the retroactive effect of the extended statutes of limitations California had passed on these so-called “repressed memory” cases so my client got out of prison relatively soon. But for these mondo bizarro continuing prosecutions based upon child witnesses who get put through the ringer by prosecutors, law enforcement officers, child welfare officers, and psychologists until they say what the adults want to hear, states need to enact strict guidelines and to implement by law what the Massachusetts Supreme Court laid out in what are known as Amirault Taint Hearings.
Orange County does it right. They have a one – interview policy for children in which there are molestation allegations. Instead of a myriad of people interviewing a child over and over and over again, everybody who needs to be in the loop comes together for a single interview to insure that the child isn’t coerced or led into inventing an incriminating story like a fairy tale.
For those cities and counties that don’t get it right even with all the experience and literature about wrongful prosecutions on molestation charges, we need Amirault Taint Hearings legislated as mandatory where there is a reasonable inference that a child was led into inventing a story for a prosecution so that some deputy prosecutor could make some headlines and advance their career.
