No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times [Paperback]

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.

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.

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.