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

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

Dorothy Rabinowitz
3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
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From Publishers Weekly

Wall Street Journal editorialist Rabinowitz has collected her stories on false accusations of sex crimes into one harrowing account of failed justice. Though readers may be familiar with the court cases she details, which took place in the 80s and 90s, coming upon them all together is nonetheless chilling. Rabinowitz devotes the most attention to the Amiraults, a woman and her two grown children who ran a successful preschool in Malden, Mass., and who were all sent to jail on charges of child sex abuse. No scientific or physical evidence linked them to the crimes; rather, the courts relied on the testimony of children who appeared on the stand after lengthy coaching sessions in which counselors had used anatomically correct dolls and leading questions to encourage them to accuse their teachers. At times the author's careful documentation begs for interpretation. Why, for instance, did the public buy the increasingly bizarre accusations of teachers tying naked children to trees in the schoolyard, or of anal penetration with knives that left no physical mark? Rabinowitz leaves such speculation to others. But she presents her cases expertly-so well that her stories helped reverse the convictions of five people, which in turn helped her win the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. She writes clearly and for the most part resists melodrama, letting the facts speak eloquently for themselves.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter comes this unsettling look at some of the sex-abuse cases of the 1980s and 1990s that saw innocent men and women convicted of charges that, in hindsight, seem absurd. Take the case of Wenatchee, a smallish city in Washington State, where an overzealous police detective, acting largely on the allegations of his two foster daughters, led an investigation that resulted in the arrest of more than 40 people on thousands of counts of sex abuse. Long after countless lives were destroyed, the "victims" admitted publicly that none of the "crimes" ever happened. The book is full of stories like this about ludicrous allegations that were taken seriously by people who should have known better. The last two decades were the heyday of the sexual-abuse witch-hunts, and this book provides a valuable record of that dark, bizarre time. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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In his early thirties, Gerald Amirault began to know what it meant to be content. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews

12 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.4 out of 5 stars (12 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5.0 out of 5 stars The power of accusation, Sep 24 2003
By 
Bert Krages (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.

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3.0 out of 5 stars Take two grains of salt and call me in the morning, Aug 12 2003
By 
Jean E. Pouliot (Newburyport, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
"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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3.0 out of 5 stars A good start at a serious work..., Aug 7 2003
By 
Jean E. Pouliot (Newburyport, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
"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.

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