Voting for a False Accuser

October 3, 2014 permalink

Child protection has become an issue in the election for governor of Massachusetts. Martha Coakley, who has been the state attorney general since 2007, is the Democratic candidate. An attack ad (YouTube, or local copy mp4) alludes to a Massachusetts foster care panic by mentioning 50 abused, neglected or dead children. It further says Coakley defended DCF (against Children's Rights Inc), opposed reform and silenced children's advocates. Muzzling parents and their supporters is universal in child protection. As for the suit, these suits are really a form of collusion between adversaries [1] [2] [3].

Mrs Coakley does not come to the campaign with clean hands. She participated in keeping Gerald Amirault in jail for 18 years for satanic abuse of children, a crime that never happened.

An article on the current controversy is enclosed, followed by Dorothy Rabinowitz reporting on Martha Coakley's involvement in the Amirault convictions.

expand

collapse

Baker: Child welfare issues raised by ad deserve debate

By Matt Murphy Published: October 2, 2014, 7:32 pm

STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, OCT. 2, 2014…..After Martha Coakley demanded that Charlie Baker repudiate an outside group’s new ad accusing the attorney general of failing to protect children, the Republican gubernatorial nominee on Thursday objected to the ad’s “tone,” but stopped short of calling for it to be removed from the airwaves.

Baker called a press conference in South Boston to respond to Coakley’s characterization of the new ad as “disgusting” and “misleading,” and her call earlier in the day for him to disavow the ad.

The ominously filmed and narrated ad, with darkened images of a child’s teddy bear and an empty playground, alleges Coakley knew about mismanagement at the Department of Children and Families that resulted in the abuse, neglect and death of more than 50 children under state supervision.

The ad, run by the Commonwealth Future super PAC and paid for by the Republican Governors Association, goes on to criticize Coakley for defending the state against a lawsuit filed by a national child advocacy group alleging mismanagement in the DCF foster care system.

“I don’t like the tone of the ad. It reminds me of the tone of a lot of the ads that have been run against me,” Baker said. “But I think the issue that’s raised by the ad, which has to do with the attorney general’s decision four years ago to fight the lawsuit that was filed by Children’s Rights, which raised very significant systemic problems at the Department of Children and Families, is a decision worth discussing.”

Coakley earlier in the day said she welcomed a debate with Baker on the issue of child welfare, but said the ad misrepresented her record. She went on to defend the decision to fight the lawsuit, which is still pending, suggesting the national group’s attorneys were seeking to profit from its lawsuit and offering a “one-size-fits-all” solution for Massachusetts that wouldn’t work.

A spokeswoman for Commonwealth Future declined to comment on the dust-up stirred by the ad, saying the ad speaks for itself.

Baker said he respected Coakley’s long career in public service, which includes a stint as chief of the child abuse unit in the Middlesex District Attorney’s office, but said he was disturbed by the allegations made by the advocacy group in the lawsuit against the Patrick administration.

“I think the attorney general certainly had an opportunity to recommend moving toward settlement and toward fixing what was broken in the agency,” Baker said.

Nearly choking up as he spoke, Baker encouraged everyone to read the briefs filed in the case.

“As a father of three kids, I’m telling you, that brief was really something,” Baker said. “It doesn’t anger me. It makes me sad. It’s case after case after case of kids who have been ping-ponged and pin-balled all over our child welfare system in really disturbing and difficult and troubling ways.”

Asked repeatedly whether he would call on Commonwealth Future, led by former Romney administration official and Scott Brown campaign manager Beth Lindstrom, to pull the ad, Baker reiterated his trouble with the tone of the ad, but would not go further.

“The attorney general has about as much control over these independent groups as I have over them and we should all remember that the first negative ad of this race was run by an independent group that started running a negative ad against me literally the same week they made a major donation to the Coakley campaign,” Baker said. “What I can control is my own message and my own campaign and I plan to continue to do that.”

The National Association of Government Employees super PAC ran an anti-Baker ad back in April kicking off the television ad wars. A senior Baker aide also pointed to an ad run by a labor and Democratic Governors Association-funded super PAC accusing Baker of profiting at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, where he was CEO, while raising premiums as an example of the negative attacks Baker has endured.

“I’m sure many of the ads that have been run against me share similar circumstances,” Baker said.

A U.S. District Court judge dismissed the lawsuit brought by Children’s Rights at one point in the proceeding, but not before bemoaning the situation in Massachusetts where he determined a lack of adequate funding had put children at risk.

Coakley and her campaign said that Baker, while serving in the Weld and Cellucci administrations, oversaw a budget that failed to adequately invest in child welfare leading to higher caseloads in the 1990s than exist today.

Baker sidestepped questions about funding for DCF during his time in state government, but said he was proud of the work he did on community-based adoption and implementing recommendations of a foster care commission convened during his tenure.

Source: WWLP citing State House News Service

---

collapse

Martha Coakley's Convictions

The role played by the U.S. Senate candidate in a notorious sex case raises questions about her judgment.

By Dorothy Rabinowitz, Updated Jan. 14, 2010 10:25 p.m. ET

The story of the Amiraults of Massachusetts, and of the prosecution that had turned the lives of this thriving American family to dust, was well known to the world by the year 2001. It was well known, especially, to District Attorney Martha Coakley, who had by then arrived to take a final, conspicuous, role in a case so notorious as to assure that the Amiraults' name would be known around the globe.

The Amiraults were a busy, confident trio, grateful in the way of people who have found success after a life of hardship. Violet had reared her son Gerald and daughter Cheryl with help from welfare, and then set out to educate herself. The result was the triumph of her life—the Fells Acres school—whose every detail Violet scrutinized relentlessly. Not for nothing was the pre-school deemed by far the best in the area, with a long waiting list for admission.

All of it would end in 1984, with accusations of sexual assault and an ever-growing list of parents signing their children on to the case. Newspaper and television reports blared a sensational story about a female school principal, in her 60s, who had daily terrorized and sexually assaulted the pupils in her care, using sharp objects as her weapon. So too had Violet's daughter Cheryl, a 28-year old teacher at the school.

But from the beginning, prosecutors cast Gerald as chief predator—his gender qualifying him, in their view, as the best choice for the role. It was that role, the man in the family, that would determine his sentence, his treatment, and, to the end, his prosecution-inspired image as a pervert too dangerous to go free.

The accusations against the Amiraults might well rank as the most astounding ever to be credited in an American courtroom, but for the fact that roughly the same charges were brought by eager prosecutors chasing a similar headline—making cases all across the country in the 1980s. Those which the Amiraults' prosecutors brought had nevertheless, unforgettable features: so much testimony, so madly preposterous, and so solemnly put forth by the state. The testimony had been extracted from children, cajoled and led by tireless interrogators.

Martha Coakley, attorney general of Massachusetts, at a campaign stop, Jan. 13.

Associated Press

Gerald, it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury. Violet had tied a boy to a tree in front of the school one bright afternoon, in full view of everyone, and had assaulted him anally with a stick, and then with "a magic wand." She would be convicted of these charges. Cheryl had cut the leg off a squirrel.

Other than such testimony, the prosecutors had no shred of physical or other proof that could remotely pass as evidence of abuse. But they did have the power of their challenge to jurors: Convict the Amiraults to make sure the battle against child abuse went forward. Convict, so as not to reject the children who had bravely come forward with charges.

Gerald was sent to prison for 30 to 40 years, his mother and sister sentenced to eight to 20 years. The prosecutors celebrated what they called, at the time "a model, multidisciplinary prosecution." Gerald's wife, Patricia, and their three children—the family unfailingly devoted to him—went on with their lives. They spoke to him nightly and cherished such hope as they could find, that he would be restored to them.

Hope arrived in 1995, when Judge Robert Barton ordered a new trial for the women. Violet, now 72, and Cheryl had been imprisoned eight years. This toughest of judges, appalled as he came to know the facts of the case, ordered the women released at once. Judge Barton—known as Black Bart for the long sentences he gave criminals—did not thereafter trouble to conceal his contempt for the prosecutors. They would, he warned, do all in their power to hold on to Gerald, a prediction to prove altogether accurate.

No less outraged, Superior Court Judge Isaac Borenstein presided over a widely publicized hearings into the case resulting in findings that all the children's testimony was tainted. He said that "Every trick in the book had been used to get the children to say what the investigators wanted." The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly—which had never in its 27 year history taken an editorial position on a case—published a scathing one directed at the prosecutors "who seemed unwilling to admit they might have sent innocent people to jail for crimes that had never occurred."

It was clear, when Martha Coakley took over as the new Middlesex County district attorney in 1999, that public opinion was running sharply against the prosecutors in the case. Violet Amirault was now gone. Ill and penniless after her release, she had been hounded to the end by prosecutors who succeeded in getting the Supreme Judicial Court to void the women's reversals of conviction. She lay waiting all the last days of her life, suitcase packed, for the expected court order to send her back to prison. Violet would die of cancer before any order came in September 1997.

That left Cheryl alone, facing rearrest. In the face of the increasing furor surrounding the case, Ms. Coakley agreed to revise and revoke her sentence to time served—but certain things had to be clear, she told the press. Cheryl's case, and that of Gerald, she explained, had nothing to do with one another—a startling proposition given the horrific abuse charges, identical in nature, of which all three of the Amiraults had been convicted.

No matter: When women were involved in such cases, the district attorney explained, it was usually because of the presence of "a primary male offender." According to Ms. Coakley's scenario, it was Gerald who had dragged his mother and sister along. Every statement she made now about Gerald reflected the same view, and the determination that he never go free. No one better exemplified the mindset and will of the prosecutors who originally had brought this case.

Before agreeing to revise Cheryl's sentence to time served, Ms. Coakley asked the Amiraults' attorney, James Sultan, to pledge—in exchange—that he would stop representing Gerald and undertake no further legal action on his behalf. She had evidently concluded that with Sultan gone—Sultan, whose mastery of the case was complete—any further effort by Gerald to win freedom would be doomed. Mr. Sultan, of course, refused.

In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor's Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a commutation of Gerald's sentence. After nine months of investigation, the board, reputed to be the toughest in the country, voted 5-0, with one abstention, to commute his sentence. Still more newsworthy was an added statement, signed by a majority of the board, which pointed to the lack of evidence against the Amiraults, and the "extraordinary if not bizarre allegations" on which they had been convicted.

Editorials in every major and minor paper in the state applauded the Board's findings. District Attorney Coakley was not idle either, and quickly set about organizing the parents and children in the case, bringing them to meetings with Acting Gov. Jane Swift, to persuade her to reject the board's ruling. Ms. Coakley also worked the press, setting up a special interview so that the now adult accusers could tell reporters, once more, of the tortures they had suffered at the hands of the Amiraults, and of their panic at the prospect of Gerald going free.

On Feb. 20, 2002, six months after the Board of Pardons issued its findings, the governor denied Gerald's commutation.

Gerald Amirault spent nearly two years more in prison before being granted parole in 2004. He would be released, with conditions not quite approximating that of a free man. He was declared a level three sex offender—among the consequences of his refusal, like that of his mother and sister, to "take responsibility" by confessing his crimes. He is required to wear, at all times, an electronic tracking device; to report, in a notebook, each time he leaves the house and returns; to obey a curfew confining him to his home between 11:30 p.m. and 6 a.m. He may not travel at all through certain areas (presumably those where his alleged victims live). He can, under these circumstances, find no regular employment.

The Amirault family is nonetheless grateful that they are together again.

Attorney General Martha Coakley—who had proven so dedicated a representative of the system that had brought the Amirault family to ruin, and who had fought so relentlessly to preserve their case—has recently expressed her view of this episode. Questioned about the Amiraults in the course of her current race for the U.S. Senate, she told reporters of her firm belief that the evidence against the Amiraults was "formidable" and that she was entirely convinced "those children were abused at day care center by the three defendants."

What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley's concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.

If the sound of ghostly laughter is heard in Massachusetts these days as this campaign rolls on, with Martha Coakley self-portrayed as the guardian of justice and civil liberties, there is good reason.

Ms. Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal's editorial board, is the author of "No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness And Other Terrors Our Times" (Free Press, 2003).

Source: Wall Street Journal