Contents

• Introduction
• Abusing Children and the Law to Obtain Convictions
• Table of Cases
• References on the Issue

Introduction

Abusing a child is a horrible crime. Child abuse is real and we need police and courts to pursue it aggressively and punish the perpetrators. But nobody benefits when the justice system breaks down and punishes innocent people for crimes they did not commit, especially when children are needlessly hurt in the process.

Many people in America remember the McMartin Preschool scandal of the 1980s, in which a half-dozen California teachers were arrested on the most fantastic charges of abusing young children in their care. Most had the charges against them dropped, but one man was held in jail for five years until two successive juries failed to agree on a verdict. Few people know about Kyle Zirpolo, the young man who came forward in 2005 to say that his testimony as a child witness in the case had been coerced by zealous prosecutors and social workers.

Few people also know that McMartin was one of dozens of cases around the same time in which staff in child-care facilities across the United States were falsely prosecuted for sexual activity with their young charges.

And few people know that such false prosecutions go on to this day, and that large numbers of people remain in prisons on life sentences resulting from such prosecutions. If something is not done, many of those people appear destined to die behind bars and more and more people will continue joining them in prison without just cause.

The Table of Cases below lists 159 cases of claims that innocent people have been falsely accused of sexually molesting children. Four of the cases are included for historical context, but the rest have taken place since 1980. In most of the cases, the innocence claims are validated by convictions being overthrown by appeals courts. In many, the courts or other reputable sources have indicated gross miscarriage of justice taking place.

Unfortunately, such a reversal usually only takes place after the wrongly accused has spent decades in prison. Worse yet, in many cases, it doesn't take place at all. In 31 of the cases documented here, as of the latest information available in early 2008, one or more of the claimed innocents remain in prison or in civil commitment.

The links in the Table of Cases go to the background report with more detailed information on each case, including links to online sources of more information, such as official case documents and reputable news reports and analyses.

Some statistics on the cases presented:

The smaller number of more recent cases does not at all indicate a decline in false accusations. It can take years or decades for cases to come to light, before a false accuser steps forward with the truth, or before other information comes to the attention of journalists or advocacy groups convincing them to take up the case and bring it to public attention.

The collection of cases presented here is by no means comprehensive, and there is no assurance that those claimed innocent are indeed so. There is no reliable method for unearthing valid cases of false accusation, and the best method for determining innocence or guilt is a fair trial, which has never taken place in most of these cases. The search that led to this compilation of cases began with the website of the National Center for Reason and Justice and moved on from there to other online listings of cases. Some other cases that are not included in any other listings arose independently in the course of conducting this research.  

Abusing Children and the Law to Obtain Convictions

While we would all like justice to be perfect, law enforcement and criminal prosecution are human endeavors that are unfortunately subject to error and mistaken judgments. This problem has come to the fore in recent years as more and more old murder and rape convictions are overturned through the use of high-tech DNA testing.

The police and courts have the important responsibility of maintaining law and order in society by apprehending and imprisoning people who commit serious crimes. One can excuse people in the legal system for making honest mistakes that lead to the occasional incarceration of innocent people. However, the cases collected here exhibit serious problems that cannot be chalked up to honest mistakes:

• Many of these cases involve egregious misconduct by members of the legal system, including police, prosecuting attorneys, expert witnesses, and judges. (See examples below.)
• The sign of an honest mistake is the willingness by those responsible for it to correct it and make amends. But among the many cases where appeals court judges or government inquiries have severely reprimanded police and/or prosecutors for serious misconduct, there is not one case in which an official of any capacity has been penalized in any way for such misconduct. Instead, many of them have gone on to build stellar careers on the backs of their false convictions, including one who became attorney general of the United States. Although some cities, counties, and states have been required by the courts to pay millions of dollars in restitution to those falsely imprisoned, the people who used illegal tactics to obtain the convictions were never called to account for their misdeeds.
• When evidence arises that gross injustice took place in a number of cases that could exonerate numerous people languishing in prison, it remains incumbent on each individual falsely imprisoned to obtain his or her own legal counsel and mount an expensive appeal. There is no mechanism or movement within the legal system to right its own wrongs.

Those three problems apply to any kind of wrongful conviction, whether for murder, robbery, or child abuse. However, there is a special circumstance when the false accusation is for sexual activity with a juvenile:

• The hallmark of false accusations of sex with juveniles is the lack of any physical evidence, and therefore the near total reliance on the courtroom testimony of children. Although forced sexual penetration of a child will generally cause distinctive bodily trauma, prosecuted sexual activity can include just touching the genitals, which will leave no evidence. Therefore, such reliance on children's testimony is often necessary. However, there are numerous cases where the actions of prosecutors in obtaining testimony can only be characterized as itself abusive of the children, often far more abusive than any activity defendants were accused of. Several specific examples are given below.

The point of the last problem mentioned is that there can be no doubt from a review of many of the cases cited here that several prosecutors have been guilty of behavior which outside the shield of their official capacity would be clearly classed as child abuse. Hundreds of children have suffered this official abuse by prosecutors, and many of them have come forward to speak up about it in defense of their parents or former teachers or neighbors who have been falsely imprisoned by their tainted testimony. As mentioned above, some of the falsely imprisoned have been compensated with civil awards of millions of dollars. But there has been no movement to compensate or even apologize to the former children who have been abused by the legal system to obtain those convictions.

Some examples of judicial misconduct in the cases collected here include:

• In Wisconsin, a judge found that the prosecuting attorney had lied under oath. The case was dismissed, but no action for perjury was taken against the prosecutor. [See Robert Wasser]
• In California, New York, Ohio, and Washington, prosecutors illegally withheld information from defense attorneys. There were no charges filed against them for their actions. [See Anthony Cox et al., San Diego, Concourse Day Care Center, Robert Aldridge et al., William Swan et al.]
• In California, an appeals court ruled that seven convictions had been obtained by “unprecedented” prosecutorial misconduct. There is no indication that any prosecutor was penalized for it. [See Ricky Pitts et al.]
• In California, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wales (UK), police and prosecutors were found to have bribed, threatened, or otherwise coaxed or coerced children into testifying against their alleged abusers. There is no indication that any of these officials has been charged with tampering with those witnesses. [See Anthony Cox et al., McMartin Preschool, Alvin McCuan et al., Harold Snowden, Dade County, Early Childhood Development Center, James Rodriguez et al., Wee Care Nursery School, Westchester-Tremont Day Care Center, Felito Mendoza, Robert Roberson et al., Peter Thorpe et al.]
• A grand jury in California found that social workers reporting their interview of a girl rape victim had modified the girl's answers to falsely implicate her father. No one was charged with perjury in the case. [See James Wade]
• In Pennsylvania, a judge is reported to have joked in a formal hearing that “the District Attorney was paying him thousands of dollars to frame” a defendant. [See Felito Mendoza]
• In Wales, UK, two women testified in court that social workers threatened them that their children would be taken from them if they did not testify for the prosecution. There is no information that anyone was charged with tampering with witnesses in the case. [See Peter Thorpe et al.]
• A judge in France declared that the case he was trying was too important to allow the defendants to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. [See Dominique Wiel et al.]

Some examples of the abuse of children in obtaining false convictions include:

• In Ohio, two boys aged ten and twelve were taken to jail and held until they provided false testimony that a man and woman in their building had molested them. The convictions were overturned eleven years later, partly based on the boys' recantations of their testimony, but there is no indication that the police officer who falsely imprisoned them was charged for it. [See Robert Aldridge et al.]
• In California, an investigation by the attorney general found that prosecutors pressured a witness's foster parents to put her on Thorazine, a drug that made her compliant under questioning. In other California cases, it is reported that a child witness was hypnotized to elicit testimony and another child was given Thorazine and other drugs to encourage cooperation with the prosecution. No actions were taken against the prosecutors for this or for other misconduct found in these investigations. [See Anthony Cox et al., Gerardo Gonzalez et al., James Rodriguez et al.]
• In Ohio, the children of a poor couple that was imprisoned for raping them have come forward to recant their testimony. Their story suggests that the foster parents used fabricated sexual allegations to keep custody of the children. If the story as told is true, then the lawyers engaged by the foster parents were complicit in the fraud. Yet there is no indication that there has been any investigation of wrong-doing by this couple or their attorneys. [See Jack Barnes et al.]
• In California, New Jersey, and many other US states, as well as Australia, young children who denied that anything sexual had taken place were led by investigators in blatantly pornographic conversations about their alleged abusers. The investigators demonstrated sexual acts with dolls, and then asked the children if such things had taken place. If the children said no, the investigators repeated the demonstrations insistently until the children gave in and agreed the acts had happened. Engaging children in such brazen sexual talk and demonstrations in any other context is criminal sexual abuse, punishable by a long prison term. As one expert witness testified, “By the process they have put them through, the authorities have taught three to five year olds about deviant sexual behavior of the most gross and irresponsible sort - and at a time when they have no ability to know what is proper behavior … They have been taught to associate violence, stabbing, cutting with sexuality and the effect is worse than if they had been abused.” Yet no investigator has ever been charged for inappropriately engaging young children in sexual talk. [See McMartin Preschool, Gerardo Gonzalez et al., Wee Care Nursery School, Seabeach Kindergarten]

In order to understand the seriousness of this abuse of children by prosecutors, note that many of the cases involve accusations that defendants engaged in sexual activity with their own children. This means that children who were coaxed or coerced to testify often did so against their own parents. Given the fundamental importance of the parent-child relationship, even when it may be dysfunctional, it is difficult to comprehend the pain a child must go through when being coaxed to tell lies about his or her parents. Surprisingly, among the vast literature of psychological studies about the reliability of children's testimony in sexual abuse cases, there does not seem to be one study of the effect on children of being coaxed or coerced to testify against their parents, whether the charges are true or false.

Whether the defendant was a parent, other relative, teacher, neighbor, or stranger, there also seems to be no study of the effect on children of growing up with the guilt of sharing responsibility for falsely imprisoning someone. It seems that this must be a horrible burden to bear. In the 149 cases of criminal prosecution presented here, there are thousands of children who suffered this fate. (At least 360 children were manipulated into making untrue statements against their teachers in just the single case of McMartin, for example.) We get a glimpse of how it feels from the story told by Kyle Zirpolo, the man who came forward in 2005 to retract his testimony in the McMartin case.

Unfortunately, it is apparently not just prosecutors who succumb to the temptation to manipulate young children in their testimony. An appeals court in one case reported that a psychologist interviewing child witnesses for the defense “used suggestive questioning and told the children he was there to help get their uncles out of prison.” [United States v. Desmond Rouse, US Court of Appeals, 8th Circuit, June 8, 2005 (search. 410 F3d 1005 (Case 04-1468, 69, 70, 71)), page 5]

Nonetheless, at least the defense psychologist's manipulation of the children did not involve imprisoning or drugging them, fraudulently keeping custody of them, engaging them in pornographic conversations, or coaxing them to lie about their parents or participate in the false imprisonment of others, as were done in the above examples of abuse by prosecutors. It is hard to understand how the appellate judges and government investigators reviewing those cases could pass over such blatant abuse of children at the hands of the legal system and not do anything at all to address the injuries done to those children.

If our society genuinely cares about the well-being of children, it would seem necessary to do at least the following:

• Initiate criminal investigations against government officials and others who committed or were complicit in the abuse of child witnesses in prosecutions of sexual activity or other crimes. Where wrong-doing is established, exact appropriate punishments on the perpetrators and make formal apologies to the victims along with appropriate financial compensation.
• Initiate proceedings to review convictions obtained in those tainted trials, instead of requiring the imprisoned defendants to mount appeals on their own. And again, make formal apologies and provide financial compensation to those who are exonerated.

If prosecutors are allowed to get away with abusing children in such cases, that seems to make a rather perverse mockery of the whole notion of using the law to protect children.  

Table of Cases

Go to the background report with information on all 159 cases.

Or go to the background report with information on all 159 cases.  

References on the Issue

The accounts in the Table of Cases include hundreds of references that relate specifically to the details and analysis of each individual case presented. This section provides a selection of more general references on the issues of false accusations and false convictions.

• On false convictions generally
  • Study Suspects Thousands of False Convictions, New York Times, April 19, 2004
  • Innocence Project

  • Telling Police What They Want to Hear, Even if It's False (2°), Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2004 (excerpt and buy. Also available, with introductory comments, at NCRJ site.)
  • Prosecutors Fight DNA Use for Exoneration, New York Times, August 29, 2003
  • Convictions of Innocent Persons in Massachusetts: An Overview by Stanley Z. Fisher, Boston University School Of Law, September 19, 2002

• On false convictions for sexual assault
  • A Poisoned Prosecution — Misconduct in sexual abuse cases damages reputations—and can ruin lives — Center for Public Integrity, June 26, 2003 (Case of Robert Wasser)
  • Excluded Evidence: The dark side of rape shield laws, Reason, February 2002
  • Crying wolf (2°) — In a system that assumes children don't lie and women are victims, false allegations happen with alarming regularity and frequency — by Christie Blatchford, National Post (Canada), September 8, 2001
  • The Personal Nightmare of a Man Falsely Accused of Rape (2°) by James Donald Anderson

• On false accusations of sex with juveniles
  • No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and other Terrors of Our Times by Dorothy Rabinowitz, Wall Street Journal Books/Free Press, April 2003
  • System Out of Balance by Patrick Clancy, Falsely-Accused (Link. Documentary video, 58 min.)

  • Watching the Detectives by Debbie Nathan and Emily Horowitz, New York Times, June 24, 2007 (Op-ed)
  • Interviewing Children in and out of Court: Current Research and Practice Implications by Karen J. Saywitz, Gail S. Goodman, Thomas D. Lyon, APSAC Handbook on Child Maltreatment, 2002
  • Investigating Child Sexual Abuse Allegations: Do Experts Agree on Anything? by Susan J. Sachsenmaier, American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress, 1998
  • Adjudication of Child Sexual Abuse Cases (1°) by John E.B. Myers, Future of Children, Princeton University / Brookings Institution (Link. V. 4, # 2, pg 84) (Article in Sexual Abuse of Children, Future of Children, Princeton University / Brookings Institution, June 1994 (Link. V. 4, # 2))
  • Doubts Rise On Children As Witnesses, New York Times, November 6, 1990
  • Medical Examination for Sexual Abuse: Have We Been Misled? by Lee Coleman, Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, Institute for Psychological Therapies, 1989 (V. 1, # 3)
  • Careers, Reputations Damaged False Molesting Charges Scar Lives of the Accused, Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1985 (excerpt and buy)
  • Public Awareness Credited for Day Care Abuse Reports, Associated Press, November 11, 1984 (Fee to access)
  • The Child Abuse Accommodation Syndrome (2°) by Roland C. Summit, Child Abuse & Neglect, 1983

  • See also the list of websites that provide lists of false accusation cases.

• Advocates for those falsely accused of sex with a juvenile
  • National Center for Reason and Justice — An innocence project for people wrongly accused or convicted of crimes against children —
  • A web of intrigue (2°) — The search for Curio leads cybersleuths down a twisted path — by Mark Sauer, San Diego Union Tribune, September 24, 2000
  • Protesting Modern Witchunts (2°) by Carol Lamb Hopkins, Justice Committee, January 7, 1997
  • Afterward — 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary — by Dorothy Rabinowitz, Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2000. See her 18 op-eds on the Amirault case and op-eds on other cases on that page.
  • Debbie Nathan — Sex pol, borders, Mexico, Yiddish, my camera —
  • Bob Chatelle's Home Page
  • Falsely-Accused by attorney Patrick Clancy
  • Mike Snedeker: Attorney, (California)
  • Harvey A. Silverglate: Attorney-at-Law, (Cambridge, Massachusetts)

• On satanic or ritualistic abuse
  • Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt by Debbie Nathan and Michael R. Snedeker, Basic Books, November 1996 (Amazon)
  • Investigator's Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse (2°, ) by Kenneth V. Lanning, FBI Supervisory Special Agent, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (US FBI), January 1992

  • Met defends satanic abuse course — The Metropolitan Police Force has been criticised for sending its officers on a course which helps identify the satanic ritual abuse of children. — BBC News, December 21, 2004
  • The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax (, 2°) by Debbie Nathan, Village Voice, January 12, 1990
  • Ritual Abuse (RA), Religious Tolerance
  • Ritual/Satanic/Sadistic Abuse, Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault: This organization presents the point of view that such abuse takes place and needs to be taken seriously.

• On recovered memories, see Q&A # 24.