Jan. 14 was the 300th anniversary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's "Day of Contrition" for the Salem witch trials. Horrified by the destruction of innocents with false accusations and false trials, the entire colony fasted and prayed for forgiveness, and the prosecutors and judges prostrated themselves before the people.
From our vantage point three centuries later, we scornfully look down upon such ignorant people whose belief in witches was so firm that they needed no evidence.In truth, however, the Massachusetts Puritans were more capable of self-scrutiny and admission of mistakes than modern-day Americans, and their legislative body made Jan. 14 a day of repentance and fasting in memory of the victims.
My associate, Larry Stratton, attended the Tuesday meeting of as many as 300 writers, scholars, scientists, defense attorneys, concerned citizens and victims of false prosecutions gathered in Salem under the auspices of The Justice Committee.
The purpose was to address the reasons and remedies for the nationwide epidemic of spurious accusations and false prosecutions of child sex abuse, which have sent scores of innocent parents and child-care workers to prison and left far larger numbers of children bereft of parents, traumatized and at the mercy of foster care.
The Justice Committee's executive director, Carol Lamb Hopkins, says, "The analogy to Salem witch trials is by no means overstated. The mentality is still with us: in the forced accusations and confessions and as we see hundreds of men and women languishing behind bars for such imagined crimes as torturing and sacrificing babies during satanic rituals. Our message is: `Enough!' "
Many distinguished people agree with her. Writers Arthur Miller, author of "The Crucible," and William Styron, participated in the conference by means of videotaped addresses. Attending were a number of experts from Yale, the University of California and other universities which have studied hysteria and false confessions, as well as the often coercive interviewing and brainwashing techniques often used on children.
Mark Pendergrast, who helped expose the fallacies of "recovered memory therapy," and Debbie Nathan, who exposed a number of fraudulent "satanic ritual" trials, which are possibly a greater blot on our time than the Salem witch trials were on our early colonial history, were among the many protesting the all-too-frequent miscarriages of justice that have destroyed innocent families in virtually every community.
Too often local prosecutors have ridden phony child sex-abuse cases to high political office. Cheryl and Violet Amirault, whose false convictions in Massachusetts were recently overturned, attended, as did Pastor Roby and Connie Roberson, who were falsely prosecuted in Wenatchee, Wash., in retaliation for speaking out against a witch hunt organized by a local police detective.
Also attending were Brenda and Scoff Kniffen, recently released from years in prison after their now grown sons described how the prosecutor deceived them into making false accusations, and Bobby Fijnje, now free of charges filed through then-Dade County prosecutor Janet Reno, the current U.S. Attorney General, and whose tribulations were recounted by Reader's Digest.
I have seen enough patently false prosecutions for child sex-abuse to know beyond any doubt that many detectives and prosecutors have no compunction about bringing to court charges that under any other legal situation would be unsupportable. And Congress and judges have made it easy to do. The normal rules of evidence have been suspended, and accusations can be anonymous, depriving the accused of his or her right to confront the accuser.
The situation is so out of hand that even the New York Times, generally a supporter of the child-abuse protections, editorialized on Jan. 10 in behalf of Susan Leventhal of Berlin, Conn., a mother of four, who has been falsely accused anonymously on five occasions.
Congress, in its folly, has created monetary incentives that encourage frame-ups. A bureaucracy known as Child Protective Services receives a federal payment for every child it seizes from "abusive" parents. CPS bureaucrats create their own definitions of child abuse. In Fairfax County, Va., for example, a mother is placed on the list of child abusers if she leaves a six-year old child alone in a car for two minutes while she rushes into the local grocery for a quart of milk.
Most Americans are unaware of the regulations that define their permissible behavior toward their own children and that give unaccountable bureaucrats Draconian powers to seize their children. The Justice Committee has been trying to get Congress to hold public hearings on its child-abuse handiwork that has run amuck.
If the U.S. Congress of 1997 had the integrity of the Massachusetts colonial legislature of 1697, it would grant this most reasonable request post haste before more innocents are ground up in witch hunts.