Child Abuse and the Law - Major Preschool Abuse Cases
The McMartin Preschool Case
The McMartin Preschool case is often considered the case that started a string of prosecutions involving preschool sexual abuse. In 1983 Judy Johnson, the mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old child enrolled at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, told police that her son had been molested by Raymond Buckey, the adult grandson of the preschool director, Virginia McMartin. Police sent letters to two hundred parents of current and former students, informing them of the molestation investigation. Soon other parents claimed to remember strange happenings, such as their children sometimes coming home in underwear and clothes that were not their own. The parents also reported behavior changes for which they could find no explanation.
Raymond Buckey was arrested, but charges of sexual abuse were later dropped for lack of evidence. In 1984 he was rearrested. His grandmother, Virginia; his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey; his sister, Peggy Ann; and three other female teachers were also arrested. In 1986 Virginia, Peggy Ann, and the teachers were released for lack of evidence.
The prosecution's primary investigator was Kee MacFarlane, director of the Children's Sexual Abuse Diagnostic Center of the Children's Institute International (CII; Los Angeles), an organization that dealt with maltreated children. CII personnel interviewed the children who had allegedly been abused. The children began to tell stories about being drugged, sodomized, penetrated with sharp objects, and used in a game called "Naked Movie Star." The interviewers used anatomically correct dolls to help the children explain what happened. The interviews were videotaped.
When the case finally went to trial in 1986, the children were ages eight to twelve and were recounting events that occurred when they were three to five years old. Defense attorneys used the videotapes to show how the interviewers elicited the desired replies from the children by asking leading questions. They also claimed that the use of anatomically correct dolls put ideas into the children's heads.
As the trial wore on, the allegations grew more fantastic (drinking blood in a church, riding in a van with a half-dead baby). The children turned out to be unreliable witnesses and many recanted their earlier statements. On January 18, 1990, the trial involving Raymond and his mother, Peggy, ended with acquittals on some counts. The jury deadlocked on other charges. Pressured by the parents, however, the prosecutor immediately retried Raymond Buckey on the deadlocked charges. The hung jury voted for acquittal. The prosecutor decided not to retry him. Raymond had already spent five years in jail and Peggy had spent two years.
Some people observe that the McMartin case is an example of how a case can be mishandled by everyone involved. They argue that MacFarlane, the child sex abuse expert who headed the investigation, was not licensed to practice therapy in California. Critics point out that the children's testimonies were the result of events suggested to them by their parents who were caught up in the mass hysteria and by the therapists who conducted the interviews. It was later discovered that Judy Johnson, the mother who made the initial allegations of child molestation, was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. She was also drinking alcohol frequently. After her first accusation, she continued to recount bizarre stories to investigators about her son's behavior, such as his having also been molested by a Los Angeles School Board member. The prosecution did not share this information with the defense for nearly a year. Johnson died of alcohol poisoning in 1986.
The Fells Acres Case
In 1984 a five-year-old boy told his uncle that Gerald Amirault, the son of the owner of the Fells Acres Day School in Malden, Massachusetts, had touched his private parts. He also told his mother of other incidents of abuse. Police notified parents about the situation, instructing them to question their children and watch for behaviors related to sexual abuse. Forty-one children, ages three to six, eventually told stories of being raped by a clown, of being forced to watch animals being killed, and of having their pictures taken naked. Although the children testified about a "secret" or "magic" room they visited daily, no child could show the police the location of the room, nor could the police find it. Violet Amirault and her children, Cheryl Amirault LeFave and Gerald Amirault, were convicted of sexual abuse. The mother and daughter received a sentence of eight to twenty years, and Gerald was sentenced to thirty to forty years.
Violet and Cheryl were released in 1995 after the Massachusetts Superior Court overturned their convictions because the seating arrangement of the child witnesses (facing the jury but not the defendants) violated their right to "face-to-face" confrontations with their accusers as guaranteed by Article 12 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights. Two years later the state's highest court reinstated their convictions, claiming that the accused had not offered sufficient proof that justice had been miscarried. Violet Amirault died of cancer later that year.
In June 1998 a Superior Court judge overturned Cheryl's conviction, noting that the accusers, then teenagers, who had never recanted their allegations of abuse, could not testify. The judge claimed that, due to investigators' leading interview methods, it could not be determined if the accusers were telling the truth. In October 1999, after eight years in prison, Cheryl Amirault LeFave was set free. Her conviction for child molestation stood, but the court commuted her sentence to time served.
On July 6, 2001, the Massachusetts Parole Board voted 5–0, recommending that Gerald's sentence be commuted. On February 20, 2002, Governor Jane Swift rejected the board's recommendation. On April 30, 2004, Gerald Amirault was finally released from prison after serving eighteen years. Authorities said they could not keep him in prison indefinitely due to lack of evidence that he was a sexually dangerous person. The accusers, even as young adults, stuck to their allegations.
The Margaret Kelly Michaels Case
In 1985 a four-year-old boy was being examined at a pediatrician's office. When the nurse took his temperature rectally, the boy remarked that his teacher had done the same thing to him while he napped. The mother went to the authorities. Police charged Margaret Kelly Michaels, the boy's teacher at the Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood, New Jersey, with child molestation. A child sexual abuse expert advised the parents of the preschool children to look for changes in their children's behavior as evidence of abuse.
In 1988 Michaels was found guilty of 115 counts of sexual abuse against nineteen children and sentenced to forty-seven years in prison. She was charged with inserting objects, including serrated eating utensils, into the children's genital organs, forcing them to eat a cake made of feces, and playing the piano naked. The state's evidence consisted of the children's allegations during the pretrial period. No medical evidence was found, and none of the other teachers noticed the alleged abuse that supposedly went on for seven months.
In 1993 the New Jersey Appellate Division reversed the conviction, remanding the case for a retrial. The court concluded:
Certain questions [by investigators] planted sexual information in the children's minds and supplied the children with knowledge and vocabulary which might be considered inappropriate for children of their age group. Children were encouraged to help the police "bust this case wide open." Peer pressure and even threats of disclosing to the other children that the child being questioned was uncooperative were used.
The New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed the appeals court's ruling and ordered a hearing to determine if the children's testimony was tainted. According to the court:
The interrogations of the child sex abuse victims were improper and there is a substantial likelihood that the evidence derived from them is unreliable. Therefore, if the State seeks to reprosecute Margaret Kelly Michaels, a pretrial hearing must be held in which the State must prove by clear and convincing evidence that the statements and testimony elicited by the improper interview techniques nonetheless retain a sufficient degree of reliability to warrant admission at trial.
The prosecution decided to drop the case. In 1994 Michaels was released after serving five years in prison.
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