False child-abuse charges still haunt Bay State

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 25, 2002 | by Paul Craig Roberts

Massachusetts Republican Gov. Jane Swift should be tarred, feathered and then run out of the Bay State. She refused the unanimous recommendation of the Governor's Board of Pardons to free an innocent man because she is afraid of a political backlash in her re-election campaign.

Aren't the citizens of Massachusetts lucky to have a governor who refuses to allow basic issues such as justice to get in the way of narrow calculations of her self-interest? Politicians are fakes, but isn't Swift laying it on too thick? How can we even pretend to respect public officials when Swift intentionally keeps an innocent man in jail simply because she is afraid to offend the evil people who framed him?

In its lead editorial on Feb. 21, the Wall Street Journal gave Swift the contempt she has earned: "She joins the long line of the ambitious and the self-seeking prosecutors and politicians who chose expediency over justice." Massachusetts has Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lots of liberals. With liberal credentials all about them, people in the state think of themselves as sophisticated. But the truth is that when it comes to justice and frame-ups, Massachusetts has made no progress since the Salem witch trials in the 17th century.

Gerald Amirault was flamed along with his sister and mother 16 years ago on fabricated child sex-abuse charges by an ambitious prosecutor who used the name recognition he gained to run successfully for state attorney general and unsuccessfully for governor. Among unbelievable and absurd charges, he accused the Amiraults of raping children in their day-care center with butcher knives.

Everyone who has read the charges on which the Amiraults were convicted recognizes that they are far less believable than the accusations at the Salem witch trials three centuries earlier. Massachusetts might have some sophisticated people, but none of them were on the jury.

State judges finally pried Amirault's sister and mother (now deceased) from the clenched claws of Massachusetts' despicable prosecutors, who go to far greater lengths to keep innocent people in jail (so as not to have to admit a mistake) than to put guilty ones there.

The Amiraults were victims, along with many other day-care providers, of the 1980s child sex-abuse witch-hunts set in motion by "child advocates" and ambitious prosecutors looking for high-profile cases. There were many wrongful convictions -- all now overturned except in the case of Gerald Amirault.

The child-abuse witch-hunts continued into the 1990s. In a last hurrah, witch-hunters in Wenatchee, Wash., managed to put 26 innocent parents in prison and sell their children into foster care or adoption. But the citizens of Washington state proved to be far more sophisticated than the befuddled souls in Massachusetts.

The bizarre allegations, and obvious police and prosecutorial misbehavior, brought investigative reporters and law professors down on the Wenatchee injustice system like a ton of bricks. Every single conviction and coerced plea bargain has been overturned. All the wrongfully convicted are flee.

What remains to be accomplished in Wenatchee is to indict and put on trial the Child Protective Services officials, police, prosecutors and judges who participated in the intentional frame-ups of innocent people. Whatever the crime rate in Wenatchee, it doesn't approach the crime rate in the city's "justice" system.

Perhaps the indifference to justice in Massachusetts merely reflects the dogma in politically correct university towns that there is no such thing as justice -- just class justice, race justice, gender justice, transgender justice, lesbian justice. Gerald Amirault isn't guilty of child abuse, but he is guilty of being a "hegemonic white male." It's just as well to have him in prison. That's where all hegemonic white males belong, or so teach the cultural Marxists who are overrepresented in the Massachusetts educational establishment.

Jane Swift's re-election campaign will be a test of Massachusetts' citizens. Will voters re-elect Swift, a person whose name is synonymous with cowardice and an utter lack of integrity?

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS IS A FELLOW AT THE INSTITUTE FOR POLITICAL ECONOMY AND A SYNDICATED COLUMNIST. ROBERTS IS A FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE U.S. TREASURY.