No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times FROM THE PUBLISHER
In 1742, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, wrote, "There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice." Two hundred forty-three years later, in 1985, Dorothy Rabinowitz, a syndicated columnist and television commentator, encountered the case of a New Jersey day care worker named Kelly Michaels, accused of 280 counts of sexually abusing nursery school children -- and exposed the first of the prosecutorial abuses described in No Crueler Tyrannies.
No Crueler Tyrannies recalls the hysteria that accompanied the child sex-abuse witch-hunts of the 1980s and 1990s: how a single anonymous phone call could bring to bear an army of recovered-memory therapists, venal and ambitious prosecutors, and hypocritical judges -- an army that jailed hundreds of innocent Americans. The overarching story of No Crueler Tyrannies is that of the Amirault family, who ran the Fells Acres day care center in Malden, Massachusetts: Violet Amirault, her daughter Cheryl, and her son Gerald, victims of perhaps the most biased prosecution since the Salem witch trials. Woven into the fabric of the Amirault tragedy -- an unfinished story, with Gerald Amirault still incarcerated for crimes that, Rabinowitz persuasively argues, not only did he not commit, but which never happened -- are other, equally alarming tales of prosecutorial terrors: the stories of Wenatchee, Washington, where the single-minded efforts of chief sex crimes investigator Robert Perez jailed dozens of his neighbors; Patrick Griffin, a respected physician whose life and reputation were destroyed by a false accusation of sexual molestation; John Carroll, a marina owner from Troy, New York, now serving ten to twenty years largely at the behest of the same expert witness used to wrongly jail Kelly Michaels fifteen years previously; and Grant Snowden, the North Miami policeman sentenced to five consecutive life terms after being prosecuted by then Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno ... who spent eleven years killing rats in various Florida prisons before a new trial affirmed his innocence.
No Crueler Tyrannies is at once a truly frightening and at the same time inspiring book, documenting how these citizens, who became targets of the justice system in which they had so much faith, came to comprehend that their lives could be destroyed, that they could be sent to prison for years -- even decades. No Crueler Tyrannies shows the complicity of the courts, their hypocrisy and indifference to the claims of justice, but also the courage of those willing to challenge the runaway prosecutors and the strength of those who have endured their depredations.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
Rabinowitz has been a proud and sometimes lonely crusader. Her book,
even with its gaps in perspective and context, makes for enraging
reading. — Susan Chira
The Washington Post
Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Wall Street Journal writer, has spent years sifting the wreckage of lives ruined by bad science and venal jurists. She has a stylish, gripping way of conveying her indignation about the fate of adults who have been falsely convicted of sex crimes. — Debbie Nathan
Publishers Weekly
Wall Street Journal editorialist Rabinowitz has collected her stories on false accusations of sex crimes into one harrowing account of failed justice. Though readers may be familiar with the court cases she details, which took place in the 80s and 90s, coming upon them all together is nonetheless chilling. Rabinowitz devotes the most attention to the Amiraults, a woman and her two grown children who ran a successful preschool in Malden, Mass., and who were all sent to jail on charges of child sex abuse. No scientific or physical evidence linked them to the crimes; rather, the courts relied on the testimony of children who appeared on the stand after lengthy coaching sessions in which counselors had used anatomically correct dolls and leading questions to encourage them to accuse their teachers. At times the author's careful documentation begs for interpretation. Why, for instance, did the public buy the increasingly bizarre accusations of teachers tying naked children to trees in the schoolyard, or of anal penetration with knives that left no physical mark? Rabinowitz leaves such speculation to others. But she presents her cases expertly-so well that her stories helped reverse the convictions of five people, which in turn helped her win the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. She writes clearly and for the most part resists melodrama, letting the facts speak eloquently for themselves. (Mar. 27) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Imagine yourself locked behind prison bars, convicted of a crime you did not commit. Such is case of many individuals in this book by Rabinowitz (Wall Street Journal), the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for Commentary, which reexamines high-profile cases of the 1980s and 1990s involving mass sexual abuse. Demonstrating that overzealous prosecutors and indifferent courts led to the prosecution of many innocents, Rabinowitz provides in-depth analyses of the major cases, especially those that involved child-care workers. He points out that accusations of inappropriate behavior by child-care professionals at various day-care centers created a "fever of suspicion." The first case involved the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, CA, when in August 1983, a woman named Judy Jones charged that a teacher there had sodomized her two-year-old son. Seven years later, all involved were acquitted. Other case studies discussed include the still open case of the Fells Acres Day Care Center in Malden, MA; Grant Snowden, a North Miami police officer wrongly imprisoned for 11 years; Kelly Michaels, a teacher at Wee Care; and marina owner John Carrol. This gripping, well-written book about social injustice and public hysteria is recommended for social science and law collections.-Tim Delaney, Canisius Coll., Buffalo, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Wall Street Journal editorial board member and Pulitzer-winner Rabinowitz revisits some of the most spectacular sexual-abuse trials of the 1980s--and concludes the guilty verdicts were egregious miscarriages of justice. Taking her title and thesis from Montesquieu�s declaration that there are no crueler tyrannies than those "perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice," the author finds nothing more baffling that the decisions of various Massachusetts authorities to continue to incarcerate Gerald Amirault, who along with other family members saw their preschool and their reputations destroyed by a flood of accusations in the mid-1980s. Rabinowitz explores the bizarre nature of the children�s claims, which included being raped publicly with sharp instruments and taken to a "magic room" in which a clown forced them to perform or endure sordid acts. (Spaceships and robots were involved too.) She attacks the entire system that made these trials possible: overzealous police and prosecutors whose leading interviews of children prompted many outrageous accusations; professional child-abuse experts willing, even eager to testify for the state; the rapacious media; a public with a boundless appetite for the salacious; incompetent public defenders; and the whole notion that children are innocent and must be believed. The author intercuts the Amiraults� sad story with accounts of other cases, including the trial of police officer Grant Snowden, convicted of a sexual offense against a three-year-old; multiple cases in Wenatchee, Washington, where more than 40 people were charged with more than 2,400 counts of abuse; the weird and disgusting charge against Dr. Patrick Griffin,convicted of performing oral sex on a woman undergoing a colonoscopy; and the conviction of a marina owner for raping his 13-year-old stepdaughter. Rabinowitz takes a few gratuitous potshots at liberals and implies that most of Harvard Law School�s faculty are cowards, but she successfully carries the point that the testimony of children in these cases must be submitted to more rigorous standards. An uncompromising look at a troubling bias in our legal system.
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