Okla-homey
1/31/2008, 07:12 AM
DISCLAIMER: Your Correspondent Does Not Abide Nor Approve of Child Abuse In Any Form
Look folks, please don't get all freaky on me. Child sex abuse is a very serious crime and people who do it need to go away, probably forever. I just wanted to take a look back at a fairly recent situation to point out parallels to the Salem Witch Trials in which innocent people's lives and reputations were ruined by overzealous prosecutors relying on unsubstantiated allegations "extracted" from children's memories by a nutcase parent and so-called "abuse counselors" who frankly...made it all up.
January 31, 1990 The McMartin Preschool Trials
http://img73.imageshack.us/img73/8308/mcmartinschool3bz.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
The facility was demolished in 1991.
On this day, seventeen years ago, Los Angeles prosecutors announce that they will retry Raymond Buckey, who was accused of molesting children at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California.
The McMartin trials had already taken over six years and cost more than $16 million without a single guilty verdict resulting from 200 charges. However, a jury had deadlocked on 13 charges (voting 11-2 for acquittal) against Buckey, and prosecutors were not willing to let the matter drop.
http://img73.imageshack.us/img73/439/raybuckeycourt3uy.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
31 year old Ray Buckey in 1990 at trial. His alleged abuse acts were said to have occured in 1984 when he was 25 and helping out his mom part-time at her pre-school.
The McMartin trial had its origins in a call placed to police in Manhattan Beach, California by Judy Johnson, the mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old son who attended the McMartin Preschool on fewer than a total of ten occasions in 1983.
Johnson told Detective Jane Hoag that a school aide, Ray Buckey, the 25-year-old son of the owner of the preschool, had molested her son. Despite the fact that the young boy was unable to identify Ray from photos and medical investigations of the boy showed no signs of sexual abuse, the police conducted searches of Buckey's home, confiscating such "evidence" as a rubber duck, a graduation robe, and Playboy magazines. Buckey was arrested and charged on Sept 7, 1983.
Judy Johnson's reports of misbehavior at the McMartin Preschool became increasingly bizarre. She claimed that Peggy Buckey, Ray's mother, was involved in satanic practices: she was said to have taken Johnson's son to a church, where the boy was made to watch a baby being beheaded, and then was forced to drink the blood.
She insisted that Ray Buckey had sodomized her son while his head was in the toilet, and had taken him to a car wash and locked him in the trunk. Johnson told police that Ray pranced around the preschool in a cape and a Santa Claus costume, and that other teachers at the school chopped up rabbits and placed "some sort of star" on her son's bottom.
http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/9652/peggycourt3dp.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Peggy Buckey
Eventually most prosecutors would come to recognize Johnson's allegations as the delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic, but the snowball of suspicion had been started rolling and set the stage for the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history.
The McMartin prosecutions represented the height of the hysteria over sexual abuse of children in America. Despite a complete lack of reputable evidence against the teachers and workers at the McMartin preschool, and with every indication that the children had been coerced and manipulated into their testimony, the prosecutors nonetheless proceeded against Ray Buckey for more than six years.:eek:
http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/5724/rubin11rj.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Lead prosecutor Rubin.
"Believe the children" became the mantra of advocates who insisted that children never lied or were mistaken about abuse. The courts made unprecedented changes to criminal procedure to accommodate this mistaken notion. The California Supreme Court ruled that child witnesses were not required to provide details about the time and place of the alleged molestation to support a conviction.
The U.S. Supreme Court held that child witnesses could testify outside the courtroom despite the Sixth Amendment's clear command that a defendant had the right to confront his or her accusers.
Throughout the nation, parents and day-care workers were jailed after false, and often absurd, allegations about child sexual abuse. As this hysteria swept the country, abuse counseling quickly became a cottage industry, attracting often-unqualified people who seemed to find sexual abuse everywhere.
Recent research has found that young children are exceptionally easy to manipulate. Even when only subtly suggested, a child will respond with the answers he or she believes a questioner wants to hear.
This was abundantly clear in Ray Buckey's case. In one instance, a girl initially failed to identify Buckey as someone who had harmed her. After an interview with Children's Institute International, the counseling agency who worked with every child in the case, the girl did pick Buckey as her attacker. It later turned out that Buckey wasn't even at the school during the time period that the child attended McMartin.
Buckey's retrial went much faster. By July, the jury had acquitted on seven charges and were deadlocked (once again, the majority voting for acquittal) on the other six accusations. The district attorney finally decided to drop the case at that point. However, Buckey and the other accused workers at the school were not allowed to bring a civil suit. The courts ruled that anyone reporting child abuse has total immunity, even if there was knowledge that the report was false.
http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/9596/virginiamcmartin3hr.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Virginia McMartin. The third of the three indictees. Mrs McMartin had run her child care facility safely and without issue for 28 years prior to this period. She died in 1995 broke with her reputation and health ruined.
Interesting similarities between the McMartin Preschool Trials
(1984-1990) and the Salem Witch Trials (c.1692) almost 300 years earlier.
1. Both the Daycare Abuse Trials (McMartin, Michaels, and others) and the Salem Witchcraft Trials placed heavy reliance on the testimony of children. In both sets of trials, people urged others to "believe the children." In practice, that generally meant, "believe the children when they are making remotely plausible accusations, but ignore the inconsistencies in their stories."
2. In both sets of trials, accusations multiplied over time. At first just a few persons faced accusations, but as the hysteria spread, so did the accusations. Often, the new targets of accusations were those who expressed skepticism about charges or who came to the defense of an accused person.
3. Both sets of trials had their origins in behaviors or statements of children -- behaviors or statements that could have been given an innocent interpretation, but instead were interpreted in the most ominous or threatening way possible.
4. In both sets of trials, "experts" found meaning in unlikely places. In Salem, for example, the presence of a mole on the body of an accused person was seem as evidence that the "familiar" had an entry (or sucking) point on the accused. In the daycare cases, for example, the drawing of hands on stick figures was seen as evidence that the child who drew the figure had been molested. In another example, a child's dislike of tuna fish was seen as evidence that the child had been exposed to adult female genitalia.:eek:
5. In both sets of trials, the investigation itself was the source of many of the problems. Investigators in both instances employed leading questions, and effectively put the burden of proving innocence on the accused. In Salem, accused persons were asked to explain how their presence could trigger such bizarre reactions in the allegedly afflicted. In the daycare cases, the accused were confronted by the suggestion that small children would not be talking about penises and the like if they hadn't been molested--when in fact their frequent use of such anatomic terms resulted from the investigation of the alleged crime.
6. In both sets of trials, the extent of the injustices was increased by the unwillingness--or fear--of enough persons to step forward and say, "This is crazy!" People in both instances feared that by doing so they might either face accusations themselves or hurt their standing in their communities -- be it the church community in Salem or the journalism community in the daycare cases.
DISCLAIMER: Your Correspondent Does Not Abide Nor Approve of Child Abuse In Any Form
http://img70.imageshack.us/img70/1206/insane7zo2es.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Look folks, please don't get all freaky on me. Child sex abuse is a very serious crime and people who do it need to go away, probably forever. I just wanted to take a look back at a fairly recent situation to point out parallels to the Salem Witch Trials in which innocent people's lives and reputations were ruined by overzealous prosecutors relying on unsubstantiated allegations "extracted" from children's memories by a nutcase parent and so-called "abuse counselors" who frankly...made it all up.
January 31, 1990 The McMartin Preschool Trials
http://img73.imageshack.us/img73/8308/mcmartinschool3bz.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
The facility was demolished in 1991.
On this day, seventeen years ago, Los Angeles prosecutors announce that they will retry Raymond Buckey, who was accused of molesting children at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California.
The McMartin trials had already taken over six years and cost more than $16 million without a single guilty verdict resulting from 200 charges. However, a jury had deadlocked on 13 charges (voting 11-2 for acquittal) against Buckey, and prosecutors were not willing to let the matter drop.
http://img73.imageshack.us/img73/439/raybuckeycourt3uy.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
31 year old Ray Buckey in 1990 at trial. His alleged abuse acts were said to have occured in 1984 when he was 25 and helping out his mom part-time at her pre-school.
The McMartin trial had its origins in a call placed to police in Manhattan Beach, California by Judy Johnson, the mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old son who attended the McMartin Preschool on fewer than a total of ten occasions in 1983.
Johnson told Detective Jane Hoag that a school aide, Ray Buckey, the 25-year-old son of the owner of the preschool, had molested her son. Despite the fact that the young boy was unable to identify Ray from photos and medical investigations of the boy showed no signs of sexual abuse, the police conducted searches of Buckey's home, confiscating such "evidence" as a rubber duck, a graduation robe, and Playboy magazines. Buckey was arrested and charged on Sept 7, 1983.
Judy Johnson's reports of misbehavior at the McMartin Preschool became increasingly bizarre. She claimed that Peggy Buckey, Ray's mother, was involved in satanic practices: she was said to have taken Johnson's son to a church, where the boy was made to watch a baby being beheaded, and then was forced to drink the blood.
She insisted that Ray Buckey had sodomized her son while his head was in the toilet, and had taken him to a car wash and locked him in the trunk. Johnson told police that Ray pranced around the preschool in a cape and a Santa Claus costume, and that other teachers at the school chopped up rabbits and placed "some sort of star" on her son's bottom.
http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/9652/peggycourt3dp.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Peggy Buckey
Eventually most prosecutors would come to recognize Johnson's allegations as the delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic, but the snowball of suspicion had been started rolling and set the stage for the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history.
The McMartin prosecutions represented the height of the hysteria over sexual abuse of children in America. Despite a complete lack of reputable evidence against the teachers and workers at the McMartin preschool, and with every indication that the children had been coerced and manipulated into their testimony, the prosecutors nonetheless proceeded against Ray Buckey for more than six years.:eek:
http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/5724/rubin11rj.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Lead prosecutor Rubin.
"Believe the children" became the mantra of advocates who insisted that children never lied or were mistaken about abuse. The courts made unprecedented changes to criminal procedure to accommodate this mistaken notion. The California Supreme Court ruled that child witnesses were not required to provide details about the time and place of the alleged molestation to support a conviction.
The U.S. Supreme Court held that child witnesses could testify outside the courtroom despite the Sixth Amendment's clear command that a defendant had the right to confront his or her accusers.
Throughout the nation, parents and day-care workers were jailed after false, and often absurd, allegations about child sexual abuse. As this hysteria swept the country, abuse counseling quickly became a cottage industry, attracting often-unqualified people who seemed to find sexual abuse everywhere.
Recent research has found that young children are exceptionally easy to manipulate. Even when only subtly suggested, a child will respond with the answers he or she believes a questioner wants to hear.
This was abundantly clear in Ray Buckey's case. In one instance, a girl initially failed to identify Buckey as someone who had harmed her. After an interview with Children's Institute International, the counseling agency who worked with every child in the case, the girl did pick Buckey as her attacker. It later turned out that Buckey wasn't even at the school during the time period that the child attended McMartin.
Buckey's retrial went much faster. By July, the jury had acquitted on seven charges and were deadlocked (once again, the majority voting for acquittal) on the other six accusations. The district attorney finally decided to drop the case at that point. However, Buckey and the other accused workers at the school were not allowed to bring a civil suit. The courts ruled that anyone reporting child abuse has total immunity, even if there was knowledge that the report was false.
http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/9596/virginiamcmartin3hr.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Virginia McMartin. The third of the three indictees. Mrs McMartin had run her child care facility safely and without issue for 28 years prior to this period. She died in 1995 broke with her reputation and health ruined.
Interesting similarities between the McMartin Preschool Trials
(1984-1990) and the Salem Witch Trials (c.1692) almost 300 years earlier.
1. Both the Daycare Abuse Trials (McMartin, Michaels, and others) and the Salem Witchcraft Trials placed heavy reliance on the testimony of children. In both sets of trials, people urged others to "believe the children." In practice, that generally meant, "believe the children when they are making remotely plausible accusations, but ignore the inconsistencies in their stories."
2. In both sets of trials, accusations multiplied over time. At first just a few persons faced accusations, but as the hysteria spread, so did the accusations. Often, the new targets of accusations were those who expressed skepticism about charges or who came to the defense of an accused person.
3. Both sets of trials had their origins in behaviors or statements of children -- behaviors or statements that could have been given an innocent interpretation, but instead were interpreted in the most ominous or threatening way possible.
4. In both sets of trials, "experts" found meaning in unlikely places. In Salem, for example, the presence of a mole on the body of an accused person was seem as evidence that the "familiar" had an entry (or sucking) point on the accused. In the daycare cases, for example, the drawing of hands on stick figures was seen as evidence that the child who drew the figure had been molested. In another example, a child's dislike of tuna fish was seen as evidence that the child had been exposed to adult female genitalia.:eek:
5. In both sets of trials, the investigation itself was the source of many of the problems. Investigators in both instances employed leading questions, and effectively put the burden of proving innocence on the accused. In Salem, accused persons were asked to explain how their presence could trigger such bizarre reactions in the allegedly afflicted. In the daycare cases, the accused were confronted by the suggestion that small children would not be talking about penises and the like if they hadn't been molested--when in fact their frequent use of such anatomic terms resulted from the investigation of the alleged crime.
6. In both sets of trials, the extent of the injustices was increased by the unwillingness--or fear--of enough persons to step forward and say, "This is crazy!" People in both instances feared that by doing so they might either face accusations themselves or hurt their standing in their communities -- be it the church community in Salem or the journalism community in the daycare cases.
DISCLAIMER: Your Correspondent Does Not Abide Nor Approve of Child Abuse In Any Form
http://img70.imageshack.us/img70/1206/insane7zo2es.jpg (http://imageshack.us)