TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012990/01291012.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.0 KB | 149 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 26

Six Years of Trial by Torture


Children, defendants, jurors and judge were all abused in the
wasteful McMartin case


    About the worst thing that can happen to a child is to be
sexually molested. About the worst thing that can happen to an
adult is to be wrongly accused of committing such a heinous
crime. The tragedy of last week's not-guilty verdict in the
McMartin case, the longest, most expensive trial in U.S.
history, is that both horrors may have occurred. Said Judge
William Pounders: "The case has poisoned everyone who had
contact with it."

    Although seven of the twelve jurors said they believed the
nine child witnesses were molested "in some sense by someone,"
the prosecution was unable to show that the children were abused
at the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach, Calif.
Nonetheless, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 63, and her son Raymond, 31,
spent two years and five years, respectively, in jail before
their acquittal on 52 criminal counts. They have lost
everything, including their good standing in the community.

    The ordeal began on Aug. 12, 1983, when Judy Johnson
complained to Manhattan Beach police that her son had been
molested by a man named Mister Ray. The boy, 2 1/2, had attended
McMartin Pre-School 14 times over three months and had been in
Buckey's class no more than two afternoons. Johnson's complaints
against Buckey grew increasingly bizarre. She accused him of
sodomizing her son while he stuck the boy's head in a toilet,
making him ride naked on a horse and tormenting him with an air
tube. She made similar accusations against her estranged
husband, an AWOL Marine, and three health-club employees.
Nevertheless, prosecutors presented Johnson as their first
witness at a preliminary hearing in July 1984.

    In 1985 Johnson was found to be an acute paranoid
schizophrenic; she died of alcohol-related liver disease in
1986. But by then the prosecution no longer needed her. The
police had written to 200 parents stating that the authorities
were investigating oral sex and sodomy at the McMartin school.
To the parents of affluent Manhattan Beach who thought the
McMartin school was the first step on the road to Stanford, this
was a bombshell. They soon had fantastic stories to tell after
their children were interviewed by Kee MacFarlane, an
administrator turned therapist at Children's Institute
International (CII).

    The interviews would prove to be the undoing of the
prosecutor's case. By early 1984, investigators concluded that
369 of the 400 children interviewed had been abused.
MacFarlane's technique seemed Pavlovian: emotional rewards to
the children who accused the teachers, rebuffs to those who did
not. "What good are you? You must be dumb," she said to one
child who knew nothing about the game Naked Movie Star.
MacFarlane recorded stories of children digging up dead bodies
at cemeteries, jumping out of airplanes, killing animals with
bats. When asked to point out molesters while driving around the
city, children fingered community leaders, store clerks and
gas-station attendants; one child picked out photos of actor
Chuck Norris and Los Angeles City Attorney James Hahn.

    Los Angeles District Attorney Robert Philibosian, whose
election campaign was not going well, made the case his own. He
presented 18 children to the grand jury, which returned
indictments against Raymond, his mother, sister, grandmother and
three McMartin teachers. On March 24, 1984, police accompanied
by television cameras arrested them at home. Raymond's sister
Peggy Ann Buckey was arrested in front of her high school class.
Only crippled matriarch Virginia McMartin, 82, honored for her
community service, was allowed to surrender voluntarily.

    In January 1986 charges against five of those originally
accused and jailed were abruptly dropped when a new district
attorney, Ira Reiner, declared a "complete absence of evidence"
against them. That did not stop a determined prosecutor, Lael
Rubin, from relentlessly pursuing the case against Peggy Buckey
and Raymond. There was little corroborating evidence. Child
pornography, which prosecutors had suggested was the Buckeys'
motive, was not proved: despite an international search for
evidence by five government agencies, including the FBI, no
pornographic photos of the McMartin children were ever found.

    Although the Buckeys were acquitted, the case is still not
closed. District Attorney Reiner must decide whether to pursue
the 13 counts against Raymond Buckey on which the jury could not
reach a verdict. Peggy McMartin Buckey has filed a $1 million
suit against the city, county, CII, and others. In Manhattan
Beach, parents of the children are outraged. "The anger is
beginning to rise," says parent Mary Mae Cioffi. "Our justice
system needs a revamp for kids."

    Nationally, the attention generated by the McMartin case
set off an explosion in the reported instances of child sexual
abuse, to an estimated 350,000 in 1988, vs. 6,000 in 1976.
Judicial reforms have been adopted to protect young victims from
being brutalized a second time in court. Specially trained
professionals question children more carefully now. More than
half the states protect children from having to testify in open
court, allowing either videotaped or closed-circuit testimony.
That protection will be tested by the Supreme Court. Last week
the Justices agreed to consider two cases in which defendants
argue that they were denied their Sixth Amendment right to
confront their accusers. So far, the reforms are working.
Although only an estimated 10% to 15% of sex-abuse complaints
are prosecuted, about 90% of those end in conviction.

    The realization, from the McMartin case and others like it,
that trustworthy authority figures can sometimes be child
molesters may have created a monster that ensnares innocent
people. One day social workers talk about how to get children
and parents to report incidents of sexual abuse; the next day
Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue have a line of people waiting to
tell their stories. Some parents, determined to damage each
other in a divorce, are throwing abuse charges around. Those
bent on destroying a reputation have a surefire weapon.

    If the McMartin children were not robbed of their innocence
by sexual abuse, it was stolen from them by a legal system that
took more than six years to bring this case to a conclusion. One
child witness was four when the abuse allegedly occurred, seven
when she first told a social worker about it, eight when she
told her story to a grand jury, ten when she told it to a judge,
and eleven when she finally told it to the jury that rendered
its verdict last Thursday. Perhaps the only thing of value that
has come out of this case is the determination to ensure that
such a fiasco can never occur again.


By Margaret Carlson. Reported by Jonathan Beaty and Elaine
Lafferty/ Los Angeles.