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Infuriating Insanity
The September 10 edition of NR has an article on a gross miscarriage of justice. It seems that before her sterling* performance as the Attorney General back in the Clinton administration, Janet Reno was one of the first prosecutors getting convictions in the mass hysteria about child abuse in daycare centers back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
As it happens, there is still one man in prison, Frank Fuster, from those cases. It’s bad enough that he’s there for a crime that never happened, but the way that the conviction was obtained makes it so much worse.
How does this happen? How can a prosecutor (along with the police investigators) abuse children into accusing an innocent man and then torture a confession from his wife and everyone pretends it’s all just fine? And when the truth comes out, that we sent several completely innocent people to prison for years because of nonsense psychobabble about repressed memories, how have we let someone stay incarcerated all this time? Why do we as a society have such a hard time saying “We were wrong” and trying to make amends?
We pay lip service to the idea that “it’s better that 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted” but when we do convict an innocent man, we just shrug our shoulders and say “[redacted] happens.”
Instead we get all outraged over nonsense like a controversial ex-NFL QB getting a contract with a big promotions company or whatever the next Twitter freakout will be 10 minutes from now when the current freakout ends. It’s infuriating.
*No, wait. The exact opposite of that.
Published in Law
Also see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Amirault
This is appalling.
I know nothing of this case, but I had occasion to study some aspects of the McMartin Preschool case, from the same period. I was led to examine that case through my study of false confessions. I had occasion to view some of the videos of the “play interviews” conducted by psychologists in that case. I could hardly comprehend what I was seeing and hearing. I still can’t. I cannot understand why those interviewers are not turning big rocks into little ones to this very day. There was beyond a doubt horrible child abuse in that case – by the investigators.
And last time I checked, the guy who made that video Clinton blamed for Benghazi, who was rousted out of bed in the middle of the night by Obama’s Gestapo I mean DOJ is still in prison, or was for a long time. It’s truly appalling.
Exactly so. Reading this I don’t see why Janet Reno shouldn’t be serving time. Not just for the torture of Fuster’s wife, but for wrongly prosecuting cases against innocent people for political gain and encouraging the mass hysteria. That’s some third-world banana republic stuff there.
Coakley in Mass., however…
Correction – should have been serving time. You’re right, it would be kind of pointless now.
I’d forgotten that!
Not to mention the sanitary issues for the other prisoners.
True. There is also the case of Father Gordon MacRae, falsely convicted of abuse in 1994. Still in prison. I suspect he will die there.
http://thesestonewalls.com/
How can this be allowed?! Hasn’t anyone tried to get him out?
I lived near Manhattan Beach (where the McMartin Preschool was located) and had many friends who were related to a McMartin or sent their children there.
The most appalling parts of those interviews is that the interviewers actually created a false memory, which from what I understand is pretty easy to do with young minds. Last I heard (and it’s been awhile) many of those people, now grown, insist they were abused.
I noticed an interesting pattern.
Three adult men I new when I was a somewhat young child and they were adults were accused of molestation. I only found out about this as an adult. All of females. (I later had teacher in high school who was into male kiddie porn and did time in federal prison).
The pattern is that these three guys were three of the biggest, sternest, most intimidating, adults I knew. I had been very afraid of two early in childhood, and the other I met only later in childhood.
If you were going to try to implant a memory of abuse, it would be more easy to take for these guys than Fred Rogers. Based on my knowledge of them, I find it highly unlikely they were guilty. None was tried, let alone convicted.
Definitely makes me think we are dealing with a lot of false/implanted memories.
So glad you brought this up.
That’s exactly what we’re dealing with. The techniques used to do this, and their success have now been well – demonstrated. I haven’t tracked how many of those same “victims” have also come forward and said that the alleged abuses never happened.
I believe this is really beyond doubt.
Yes. A bunch of people are trying to get him out, including Dorothy Rabinowitz of the WSJ. He was convicted. There is no physical evidence at all. Trying to overturn a conviction without clear and convincing evidence is nearly impossible. I don’t know how the prosecutor sleeps at night.
Every time I hear Janet Reno’s name I think of this:
and this:
Then I stop because my head will explode if I think about her any more and the other terrible things she did.
Perhaps the Lord can find forgiveness for her, for I am not sure I could.
Waco always come to mind when I hear her name. That was one chilling event. The fact that it is usually glorified as an example of how our alphabet agencies do so much good and their agents are so brave, when in reality David Koresh was always out and about and could easily have been picked up during any of his numerous weekly outings — this has always made my skin crawl.
Why does no one ever mention that Reno, Coakley and every other prosecutor in these cases was a leftist?
Or her threat to local banks to string them up if they didn’t give loans by racial quota rather than dispassionate economic analysis. We saw how that worked out.
But the double tragedy is that these young people now have a memory, and actually suffer as an abuse victim.
My best friend’s very-young-at-the-time son once said something incredibly inappropriate to a cousin. It’s not something he would have just heard or picked up. She had to be very, very careful questioning him about how he was aware of the term, or the thing it described. He was so anxious to please her, he began to make stuff up.
On the other hand, you had a not-much-older cousin repeating it and claiming he’d heard it from the younger cousin.
Who do you believe and what do you do?
Read Licensed to Lie and I guarantee you’ll never sleep at night.
I’ll second the recommendation. I sleep at night, but I think about it in connection with every mention of the DOJ by the news media.
Without the intention of making light of a very serious subject, this subject is why my kids were put to bed every night and told they were having a wonderful childhood.
My sister has such a bad memory of our family life (nothing bad; just inaccurate) that she regularly adds “or did I dream that?” when she recounts something.
I had a friend who was treated pretty strictly by her father. (Abuse by today’s standards; stuff like having to say a rosary while kneeling on rice) Her daughter, when grown, began to share those stories to therapists as her own. She could have just been lying but I don’t think so. I think she had woven them into the fabric of her memory.
For these reasons, I always advise anyone who did have a bad childhood, with legitimate occurrences of abuse, to not share with their children.
Oh, but she is serving time, permanently.
Wenatchee, Washington had its false accusations, too.
That witch hunt was featured on America’s Most Wanted… years after the convictions were overturned.
This is terrible, how is this allowed in America? Why is this guy STILL in prison?
Because Prosecutors in your country have absolute immunity. They almost never get disbarred for committing crimes.
If Prosecutors knew that they could go to jail for false prosecutions, this would become less of a problem.
There was a guy who was recently let go by the Innocence project. The prosecutors knew that he was in Florida at Disneyworld at the time of the crime. He had numerous photos and dozens of eye witnesses. The prosecutors were able to suppress the evidence and an innocent man went to prison for 20 years.
The prosecutor I think was promoted.
And Robert Mueller knows this.
That will be one advantage of today’s culture of taking endless pictures and videos of everything. My kids are always going back looking at the pictures and seeing evidence of their life as it really is, reinforcing the memories.
This would be difficult to implement, but something does need to be done. You don’t want prosecutors to hesitate to bring valid cases to court, even cases where they think they might lose, but if you bring in the risk that they could be charged with false prosecution then that might happen. And you don’t want every criminal defendant bringing up charges of false prosecution because the vast majority of the time prosecutors aren’t unethical. But in cases like this, or cases where the DA’s office suppresses evidence that proves the innocence of the defendant, there does need to be some consequence for the prosecutor.
Of course it will never happen. Politically it’s a complete non-starter. Even more modest criminal justice reform that enjoys bipartisan support is dead these days where no one on either side will dare work across the aisle and risk being crucified by their base.