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Title: No Crueler Tyrannies : Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times by Dorothy Rabinowitz ISBN: 0-7432-2840-5 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 02 March, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.54 (13 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A good start at a serious work...
Comment: "No Crueler Tyrannies" retells the frightening prosecutions of supposed child sexual predators in the 1990s, focusing on the Fells Acre Day School case in Malden, Massachusetts. The book also skims over several other less notorious cases of horrifying child abuse. All of these cases show the alarming propensity among some prosecutors in the 1980s and 1990s to throw otherwise law-abiding citizens into prison, using the coached testimony of young children. Not to mention the Catch-22 judgements of so-called child experts who convinced juries that a child's denial of abuse was proof that it had taken place.
The book is a quick read, and very sketchy on details. Rabinowitz is satisfied to tell us about testimony rather than laying it out for us to judge on our own. This left me with a certain discomfort: it's easy for ideologues to get their points across when they shout their conclusions without disclosing their premises or evidence. This weakness aside, it's hard not to be angry and frightened that prosecutors can so skew the facts (in one case, holding back tape of an alleged perpetrator's anxious denial of the charges) and that the rest of us can so blithely go along with them.
The 1980s-an era when it was more and more common for working parents to entrust their children to day care centers-were ripe for bizarre child molestation cases. The guilt and anxiety over leaving their children with "strangers" made it easy for parents to believe that their worst nightmares were coming true. The post-9/11 environment is ripe for similar cases - this time targeting those who are perceived to be soft on homeland security. Books like Rabinowitz's however imperfect, serve as cautionary tales of our paranoid propensity to believe the worst about each other.
Rating: 5
Summary: The power of accusation
Comment: Americans tend to put great faith in their justice system but, despite the legal doctrine of the presumption of innocence, they also tend to assume that persons accused of crimes are in fact guilty. This book deals with the power of accusations, in combination with dubious expert testimony, to undermine a person's right to a fair hearing and result in the incarceration of innocent individuals. It focuses on some of the most public sex abuse prosecutions during the 1980's and 1990's and shows how justice was subverted by a combination of overzealous "experts," unfair limitations on the defendants' ability to present exculpatory evidence, and the vagaries of the appeals process. These cases, and particularly the Wenatchee prosecutions, are about as close as American justice has come to the Kangaroo courts of the former Soviet Union.
One of the book's strong points is its explanations of how so called experts spend weeks coercing children to accuse adults that they had been sexually abused relying on the principle that a child who denies such events occurred is necessarily repressing their memory and a child that makes the accusation is telling the truth. In such a case, no accused person can ever be cleared. Readers interested in this issue might also want to look at Whores of the Court by Margaret Hagen. It also shows how prosecutors used the experts to present testimony that what the children said was true and how judges limited cross-examination and rebuttal evidence on the grounds that it was bad for the children. The book also offers some eye-opening detail on the limits of the appeals process to correct injustices.
The book could have been better had it gone into more depth on the viewpoints of the prosecutors and their experts. It also could have benefitted from a more detailed discussion of the kinds of testimony that occurs in bona fide sexual abuse cases. However, these shortcomings do not detract significantly from the major premise that in some cases the political and social weight given to an accusation can deprive patently innocent people of their right to justice.
Rating: 3
Summary: Take two grains of salt and call me in the morning
Comment: "No Crueler Tyrannies" retells the frightening prosecutions of supposed child sexual predators in the 1990s, focusing on the Fells Acre Day School case in Malden, Massachusetts. The book also skims over several other less notorious cases of horrifying child abuse. All of these cases show the alarming propensity among some prosecutors in the 1980s and 1990s to throw otherwise law-abiding citizens into prison, using the coached testimony of young children. Not to mention the Catch-22 judgements of so-called child experts who convinced juries that a child's denial of abuse was proof that it had taken place.
The 1980s-an era when it was more and more common for working parents to entrust their children to day care centers-were ripe for bizarre child molestation cases. The guilt and anxiety parents felt over leaving their children with "strangers" made it easy for parents to believe that their worst nightmares were coming true. When outlandish charges arose, the path of least psychic resistance for parents was to swallow them whole them than with a grain of salt.
The book is a quick read, and sketchy on details. Rabinowitz states her conclusions about testimony rather than laying it out for us to judge on our own. The accused are all ordinary, noble souls with all the cards stacked against them; the prosecutors all blinded by ambition or stupidity, desperate to placate a howling mob looking for convictions. This left me with a certain discomfort: a classic tactic for ideologues is to paint reality in black and white, shouting their conclusions without disclosing their premises or evidence. There is some of this flair to this book. I'd love to see the Amiraults do something boneheaded that feeds into the mob's preconceptions, just to show they are capable of making mistakes. This weakness aside, it's hard not to be angry and frightened that prosecutors can so skew facts (in one case, holding back audio tape of an alleged perpetrator's anxious denial of the charges) and that the rest of us can so blithely go along with them. It's one thing to see this on "The Practice," and quite another to see it in real life.
The post-9/11 environment is ripe for similar cases - this time targeting those who are perceived to be soft on homeland security. Books like Rabinowitz's, however imperfect, serve as cautionary tales of our paranoid propensity to believe the worst about each other.
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Title: The Killing of Bonnie Garland: A Question of Justice by Willard Gaylin ISBN: 0140250956 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial by Elizabeth Loftus, Katherine Ketcham ISBN: 0312084552 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 15 July, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote ISBN: 0679745580 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 February, 1994 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Mindhunter : Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas ISBN: 0671528904 Publisher: Pocket Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs by James P. Gray ISBN: 1566398606 Publisher: Temple Univ Press Pub. Date: 02 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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