Abusive justice: the child-abuse craze has passed from the media spotlight. But many innocent people are still fighting for their lives

National Review, June 30, 1997 by Rael Jean Isaac

Sometimes the ordeal is not over even when it seems finally, mercifully, to be at an end. In April of this year the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overruled the appellate judge, reinstating the convictions of Violet and Cheryl Amirault in the interests of achieving "finality." For Violet Amirault, at 74, prison would be finality indeed. (There has been a last-minute stay of execution. The Superior Court judge who was expected to carry out the decision of the Supreme Judicial Court instead defiantly ordered a new trial. Stay tuned via the Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz, who brought the Amiraults to national attention -- including Violet's son Gerald who is still in jail.)

Apparently finality is a virtue only when it incarcerates. Prosecutors have been unwilling to close the door on the case that has made Edenton, North Carolina, internationally infamous, thanks to Ofra Bikel's brilliant documentaries on PBS's Frontline. In 1995, the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the appellate decision that threw out the convictions of Little Rascals Day Care owner Robert Kelly (12 consecutive life sentences) and cook Dawn Wil- son (merely one life sentence), the only two of the "Edenton 7" actually to go before a jury. (Sample allegations by the children: they were taken aboard a space ship and abused in outer space; "Mr Bob" [Kelly] killed babies with a gun; abused on a ship while trained sharks swam around the boat.) But in a case of vindictive prosecution, Assistant DA Nancy Lamb has conjured up a new, previously unknown supposed victim of Kelly's and is now pressing forward. Bob Kelly has shown amazing grace through this ordeal. After six years in prison, he has lost everything, but still tithes his small salary as a telephone maintenance man.

Still, Kelly has been comparatively fortunate in that his case attracted international attention, forcing the appellate court to examine it closely. The same appeals court upheld the three consecutive life sentences of Patrick Figured, whose trial, held without fanfare, had been contemporaneous with that of Kelly. Yet public appellate defender Mark Montgomery, who represented both men, says that legally the case was even worse than Kelly's. Once the therapists were through with them, the children insisted "Pat" forced the dog to urinate and made them drink it, thrust candles and screwdrivers up their rectums, forced them to perform oral sex, and burned a Bible in a barrel while dressed up like the devil. Co-workers testified that Figured worked eight-to-five as a manufacturing manager at a job an hour's drive away from the day care center and was never absent from the office except for a lunch break. He would have had to fly on a broom to be present on some of the occa- sions when he was accused of inflicting his laundry list of Satanic crimes.

How many innocent people are currently serving long, often life sentences for sexual abuse of children? The situation in North Carolina suggests a sig- nificant national problem. Montgomery says that for the last ten years he has been almost exclusively engaged in appeals in sexual-abuse cases, around 250 in all. Asked how many of those convicted were innocent, Montgomery said he was unable to say. What he could say was that most trials were so poorly con- ducted, and the defendant's ability to mount a defense so limited, that an objective reader of the transcripts would say at the end of it, "Well, this guy might have done it, but we sure wouldn't know it from the trial."