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McMartin Preschool Trial

The McMartin preschool trial was a day care sexual abuse case in the 1980s, prosecuted by the Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner. Members of the McMartin family, who operated a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were charged with numerous acts of sexual abuse of children in their care. Accusations were made in 1983. Arrests and the pretrial investigation ran from 1984 to 1987, and the trial ran from 1987 to 1990. After six years of criminal trials, no convictions were obtained, and all charges were dropped in 1990. When the trial ended in 1990, it had been the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history.[1] The case was part of day-care sex-abuse hysteria, a moral panic over alleged Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Day-care sex-abuse hysteria:

Day-care sex-abuse hysteria was a moral panic that occurred primarily in the 1980s and early 1990s featuring charges against day-care providers of several forms of child abuse, including Satanic ritual abuse.[1][2] A prominent case in Kern County, California first brought the issue of day-care sexual abuse to the forefront of the public awareness, and the issue figured prominently in news coverage for almost a decade. The Kern County case was followed by cases elsewhere in the United States as well as Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, and various European countries.

Moral panic:

A moral panic is a feeling of fear spread among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society.[1][2] A Dictionary of Sociology defines a moral panic as "the process of arousing social concern over an issue – usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media".[3]

The media are key players in the dissemination of moral indignation, even when they do not appear to be consciously engaged in crusading or muckraking. Simply reporting the facts can be enough to generate concern, anxiety, or panic.[4] Stanley Cohen states that moral panic happens when "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests." Examples of moral panic include the belief in widespread abduction of children by predatory paedophiles,[5][6][7] belief in ritual abuse of women and children by satanic cults,[8] the War on Drugs,[9] and other public health issues.

Satanic ritual abuse: more on this later

Satanic ritual abuse (SRA, sometimes known as ritual abuse, ritualistic abuse, organised abuse, sadistic ritual abuse, and other variants) was the subject of a moral panic that originated in the United States in the 1980s, spreading throughout the country and eventually to many parts of the world by the late 1990s. Allegations of SRA involved reports of physical and sexual abuse of people in the context of occult or Satanic rituals. In its most extreme form, SRA involves a worldwide organisation including the wealthy and powerful of the world elite in which children are abducted or bred for sacrifices, pornography and prostitution.

Nearly every aspect of SRA was controversial, including its definition, the source of the allegations and proof thereof, testimonials of alleged victims, and court cases involving the allegations and criminal investigations. The panic affected lawyers', therapists', and social workers' handling of allegations of child sexual abuse. Allegations initially brought together widely dissimilar groups, including religious fundamentalists, police investigators, child advocates, therapists, and clients in psychotherapy. The movement gradually secularized, dropping or deprecating the "satanic" aspects of the allegations in favor of names that were less overtly religious such as "sadistic" or simply "ritual abuse" and becoming more associated with dissociative identity disorder and anti-government conspiracy theories.

Kern County child abuse cases

The Kern County child abuse cases started the day care sexual abuse hysteria of the 1980s in Kern County, California.[1] The cases involved claims of paedophile-sex-ring-performed Satanic ritual abuse, with as many as 60 children testifying they had been abused. At least 36 people were convicted and most of them spent years imprisoned. Thirty-four convictions were overturned on appeal. The district attorney responsible for the convictions was Ed Jagels,[2] who was sued by at least one of those whose conviction was overturned,[3] and who remained in office until 2009.[4] Two convicts died in prison, unable to clear their names.

Ed Jagels

Ed Jagels was an American prosecutor best known for obtaining child sexual abuse convictions as Kern County, California District Attorney against 36 innocent people in the Kern County child abuse cases, and for leading successful conservative efforts to replace liberal California Supreme Court justices in the 1980s.[1][2]

Career

Jagels was first elected to the Kern County prosecutor's office in 1983,[3] at a time when the United States public attention was focused on rumors of child molestation and Satanism, all of which proved to be false. Soon after his election he created a task force to investigate sex crimes against children. The cases eventually brought between 1983 and 1987 involved false claims of satanic ritual abuse performed by eight supposed pedophile groups. The cases, brought without physical evidence, were based solely on the testimony of alleged child victims who had been coached and sometimes tricked into testifying against their parents and other adults. Long prison sentences were obtained against many adults, but the cases began to unravel in the late 1980s as the children recanted their testimony.[3]

Of the 26 convictions, 25 were reversed. One defendant was in prison for 19 years before his conviction was reversed.[4] The county paid out nearly $10 million to settle claims made by the former prisoners and the alleged victims.[5] Actor Sean Penn, who met a man accused of child sex crimes, narrated and served as executive producer for the documentary film, Witch Hunt, concerning the event.[5]

As a "get tough on crime" prosecutor, Jagels was very popular in his conservative town of Bakersfield, California even after his earlier cases unraveled. In the 2000s he prosecuted a man under the three strikes law, which carried a mandatory 25-year prison sentence, for stealing a pack of doughnuts worth less than $1, because the man had been convicted of two felonies in the 1970s.[6] He was unapologetic about the false convictions in the 1980s sex abuse cases, and was re-elected six times as district attorney, before announcing his retirement in 2009.[5] He led a voter campaign to defeat three liberal justices from California's supreme court, and was influential in promoting victims' rights, the death penalty, and California's three strikes law. In 1986, a grand jury released a blistering report on the sex abuse prosecutions, accusing Kern County officials of fostering a "presumption of guilt", concealing exculpatory evidence and bringing charges based on guesswork. California Attorney General John Van de Kamp, a Democrat, released a report that year reaching the same conclusions. By his second term, Jagels had tripled the number of prosecutorial complaints lodged against the District Attorney's office. By 2009, Kern County paid out more than $9 million in wrongful conviction settlements.[5][7]

Personal

Jagels wife, Bryanna Michal Jagels, whom he later divorced, had arrests in 2003 and 2004, for attempting to fill forged narcotics prescriptions.[8][9] On May 17, 2003, Jagels was pulled over by a California Highway Patrol officer for speeding in a 1969 Porsche that had not been registered in three years. The officer did not give him a citation.[10]

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Legacy

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Effects on child abuse research

Shortly after investigation into the McMartin charges began, the funds to research child sexual abuse greatly increased, notably through the budget allocated for the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN). The agency's budget increased from $1.8 million to $7.2 million between 1983 and 1984, increasing to $15 million in 1985, making it the greatest source of funding for child abuse and neglect prevention in the United States. The majority of this budget went toward studies on sexual abuse with only $5 million going towards physical abuse and neglect.

Federal funding was also used to arrange conferences on ritual abuse, providing an aura of respectability as well as allowing prosecutors to exchange tips on the best means of obtaining convictions. A portion of the funds were used to publish the book Behind the Playground Walls, which used a sample of children drawn from the McMartin families. The book claimed to study the effects of "reported" rather than actual abuse but portrayed all of the McMartin children as actual victims of abuse despite a lack of convictions during the trial and without mentioning questions about the reality of the accusations.[40][41] Another grant of $173,000 went to David Finkelhor who used the funds to investigate allegations of day care sexual abuse throughout the country, combining the study of verified crimes by admitted pedophiles and unverified accusations of satanic ritual abuse.[42]

To be continued...

Rob Zombie - Lords of Salem