Posted on 01/20/2010 8:50:23 AM PST by FreeManDC
Following a breath-taking electoral surge, Scott Brown took the seat formerly held by liberal patron saint Ted Kennedy, handily defeating Democrat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts senate election.
Although the national press spun the contest as a referendum on Obamacare, another powder-keg issue lurked behind the headlines: Martha Coakley's prominent role in prosecuting a child abuse case and her contended culpability of the "primary male offender."
It was back in 1984 when Violet Amirault, son Gerald, and daughter Cheryl, operators of the Fells Acre Day School in Malden, found themselves accused of child molestation. The charges were lurid as they were absurd: plunging a butcher knife into a 4-year-old boy's rectum (which miraculously left no mark of injury) and tying a naked child to a tree in front of the school to be anally impaled with a "magic wand" (an incident to which there were no witnesses).
The children also accused two make-believe persons, "Mr. Gatt" and "Al," as well as the child therapist investigating the case, of molesting them as well. Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and Mr. Greenjeans reportedly escaped legal scrutiny.
Following a sham trial, Violet and her daughter were handed an 8-20 year sentence, while Gerald was sent to the slammer for a 30-40 year stint.
Based on accumulating evidence of perjury and fraud, the case was reopened eight years later.
Following widely-publicized hearings, Superior Court Judge Isaac Borenstein sadly concluded, "Every trick in the book had been used to get the children to say what the investigators wanted." The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly similarly editorialized the prosecutors "seemed unwilling to admit they might have sent innocent people to jail for crimes that never occurred."
Enter Martha Coakley, who took over as the local district attorney in 1999. By that time, public opinion was running sharply in favor of the defendants. (Violet had recently died of cancer, left penniless and broken by the accusations.)
Coakley was willing to allow Cheryl to go free. But as far as Gerald, that was a different matter. After all, he was a man, the "primary male offender," as Coakley put it. (She never explained how it is possible to have a "primary offender" for a crime that never took place.)
So when the Massachusetts Governor's Board of Pardons voted 5-0 to release Gerald Amirault in 2000, prosecutor Martha Coakley channeled her inner community organizer and media maven. She unearthed sympathetic parents to lobby the Massachusetts governor to overturn the Board's recommendation. Then she organized media events where persons spoke movingly of their fear of Gerald's planned release.
These maneuvers kept Gerald behind bars for two more years. Even afterwards, he was forced to wear an electronic tracking device, to report every time he left his house, to obey a curfew, and to avoid certain parts of town. This precluded him from finding regular employment.
This legal travesty did not attract national attention until last Fall. At that point, Coakley held a nearly insurmountable 30-point lead over her Republican challenger.
Then Ann Coulter devoted her December 9 column to the case, calling it the "second-most notorious witch trial in Massachusetts history" and charging Coakley had "kept a clearly innocent man in prison in order to advance her political career."
A month later, Dorothy Rabinowitz delivered the coup de grace. Recounting in the Wall Street Journal how prosecutors cast Gerald as the chief predator, "his gender qualifying him, in their view, as the best choice for the role," Rabinowitz adjudged the superfluous prosecution was "powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat."
The Rabinowitz editorial was published on January 14. The same day a Suffolk University poll spotted Brown a 4-point lead over Martha Coakley.
And when the ballots were tallied nearly a week later, Scott Brown had defeated Coakley by a resounding five-point margin.
Four years ago prosecutor Michael Nifong's political aspirations came to an abrupt halt for prosecuting the three Duke lacrosse players. And now Martha Coakley has lost her bid for the United States Senate.
Prosecuting innocent men for crimes they didn't commit is no longer the sure-fire formula to electoral success it once appeared to be.
She should have been disbarred.
Yet Malden still went for Coakley by 5%.
The only good thing that old Mike Wallace did was blow the off the McMartin Preschool prosecution fiasco during a Sixty Minutes segment.
She did the same to Louise Woodward. Karma is a bitch.
Malden was one location (Holmes School) where voters
were interrogated as to whom they voted for before
their votes were either logged .. or deep six-ed.
Ann has a nice write-up about this in one of her past columns.
“Then Ann Coulter devoted her December 9 column to the case, calling it the “second-most notorious witch trial in Massachusetts history” and charging Coakley had “kept a clearly innocent man in prison in order to advance her political career.”
Ann has a healthy impact.
Malden is cesspool. Ed Markey’s from there.
Was Woodward the British au pair who killed the young boy? If that was the one, she was guilty.
Gerald Amirault crime, even more than being born male, was trying to earn an honest living. If he had only tried to kill Americans as an Islamic insurgent, he might have been set for life living in an island paradise like Bermuda.
Did the Lamestream media even covered this story? Most of us focused on this race because of CommieCare and the 60 RAT votes in the Senate. To say anything else, that’s the spin!
The various child day care center and satanic ritual abuse railroad cases of the 80’s were part of a larger subliminal strategy to generate (via panic over heinous crimes involving children) a public tolerance for the relaxation of evidentiary and search and seizure laws. My bet is that this attempt at fascism came from the same think tanks as Outcomes Based Education (OBE) and possibly the missing children epidemic of a few years earlier.
Once Louise Woodward chose Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld to defend her she didn’t stand a chance.
No on has forgotten their defense of OJ Simpson.
Suddenly have so called experts insisting that shaken baby syndrome doesn’t exist.
Guess you can buy any expert opinion you can afford.
Dorothy Rabinowitz covered this extensively in the Wall Street Journal for years, even before the outrageous verdict.
I think more than disbarring would be in order to someone who willfully imprisoned an innocent person.
Why do I suddenly feel the need to watch “Count of Monte Christo” with Jim Caviezel...
Denial thy name is Ifeminist. I’m sure that may have had a part, a small part.
No. She was framed. Thats how Dem lawyers make their nams in Politics.
“In 2007, Dr Patrick Barnes, the prosecution’s star medical witness, reversed his opinion: he concluded that death could have been caused by an old injury, as argued by the defense. In a scientific paper he states: “The science we have today could, in fact, have exonerated Louise. There is certainly, in retrospect, reasonable doubt.” [6]” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Woodward_case
“Barnes says he had been indoctrinated throughout his career to believe that “there were certain features that were absolutely classic, that they were child abuse and could be nothing else.” He didn’t question those teachings, he says, until soon after the Woodward trial when he learned more details of the case, such as that Matthew had a weeks-old wrist fracture. “None of this was ever revealed to me by the prosecution,” he says. “I began to have real concerns about how a case like that was being handled.” He also began to wonder if previous injuries or genetic vulnerability could have caused the fatal insult to Matthew’s brain.
Barnes delved into the medical literature on head trauma, neurosurgery, and biomechanics. At Children’s Hospital, he began to examine infants and images brought to his attention by defense attorneys in other cases. “I started seeing a number of cases and recommending that we do MRIs,” he says. “We saw other conditions – accidental trauma, infections, clotting, bleeding problems – that could be mimicking or causing these symptoms.” And suddenly, he says, he realized that “what people had been concluding about shaken baby syndrome, they were assuming.” http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/02/11/the_agonizing_complicated_lingering_questions_of_shaken_baby_syndrome/
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