Indictment

I'd never heard of the 1995 HBO movie Indictment until recently, and wasn't sure if it would be any good. On a whim I added it to my Netflix queue. The film deals with the McMartin Preschool case that consumed the media in Southern California, and eventually nationwide, in the early 1980s.

As you probably recall, the owner and several employees of the Manhattan Beach preschool were indicted on charges of sexually molesting the children. Hysteria ensued; similar allegations struck other preschools across the country; some far-out religious organizations began to claim that there was a vast conspiracy of child-abusing Satanists running daycare centers across the country. Naturally the McMartin defendants were presumed guilty; children, we were repeatedly told, "just don't lie" about sexual abuse.

Except it turns out that they do. Or more precisely, young children are still at the stage of "magical thinking," when the line between fact and fantasy is blurry, if not nonexistent. Pressured to say they were touched in inappropriate places, they will eventually say whatever the adult authority figures around them want to hear.

The case was a gross miscarriage of justice. After an unconscionable delay, charges were dismissed against most of the defendants, but two of them still had to stand trial. One was acquitted on all charges; the other was acquitted on most counts, with a hung jury on the others. In an outrageously unnecessary second trial, this remaining defendant still was not convicted (the jury acquitted him on some counts and was deadlocked on others), and the D.A.'s office finally threw in the towel - more than five years after the start of the whole sorry affair.

What makes the case so infuriating is that the D.A.'s office knew or should have known almost from the outset that the charges were phony. The initial claim of molestation was made by an emotionally unstable woman later diagnosed to be suffering from acute paranoid schizophrenia, a woman who accused a variety of relatives, neighbors, and strangers of abusing her young son. Her rambling, obviously delusional complaint was never forwarded to the defense team by the prosecution, and her later accusations of child abuse against other parties were deliberately covered up so that the defense wouldn't hear of them.

As the case dragged on, the children's claims began wilder and wilder. Not only had they been made to strip naked and engage in sex play with the preschool workers (in a building with large uncurtained windows situated on a busy street), but they had been taken to a cemetery and made to dig up corpses ... they had been led through a maze of underground tunnels beneath the school to a secret hideaway ... they had been escorted to a church where animals were ritually sacrificed on the altar ... they had been flown in a hot air balloon to a distant location ... they had been forced to watch as one of the staffers killed a horse with a baseball bat ...

Fantasy after fantasy after fantasy. Yet the D.A.'s office insisted that all of the defendants were guilty, holding many of them in jail for months or years. (Ray Buckey, the last defendant to be acquitted, spent more than five years in prison without bail.) In all this time, no physical evidence ever emerged to back up the children's increasing outlandish stories. Medical exams showed no signs of abuse. No pornographic pictures or videos of the children were found, despite a worldwide search. There were no tunnels under the school; the desperate investigators actually excavated the area, with no results. (Later, a crackpot archaeologist spent a brief time at the site and claimed he had found tunnels, but what he had really uncovered were some 1940s-era garbage dumps. Even the prosecution didn't take his "evidence" seriously.)

You would think that a case this badly botched, rife with prosecutorial misconduct, would have resulted in severe career penalties for the city attorneys involved. Apparently not. The woman in charge of the case, Lael Rubin, remained on the staff  of the Los Angeles County D.A.'s office long after the McMartin case finally collapsed. To my knowledge, she has never admitted fault for any of her actions. Indeed, she seems to be continuing such tactics. In 2003, the D.A.'s office was rebuked for failing to share crucial evidence with the defense in order to obtain a conviction. Who was in charge of the policy that was supposed to prevent such abuses? Lael Rubin.

The McMartin debacle highlights several important points that our society seems unwilling to learn. First, prosecutors enjoy extraordinary discretion in pursuing defendants who may well be innocent; even when clearly innocent people are subjected to extreme harassment over a pri0d of years, there is rarely any price paid by the offending prosecutor. The Duke lacrosse "rape" case is a more recent example. My guess is that prosecutors abuse their authority on a daily basis, and only the most notorious cases become public knowledge.

Second, as a society we have a tendency to lapse into hysteria the moment that "the children" are invoked. Almost any danger to children, whether real or imagined, significant or trivial, can generate a mob mentality. The Salem witchhunts are not as far behind us as we like to think.

Third, conspiratorial thinking comes naturally to a significant part of the American public, who had no problem believing that hundreds of daycare centers around the nation were engaging in systematic ritualistic abuse. This suggests that "magical thinking" is a stage of development not limited to the very young.

Fourth, the ego is a dangerous master. Lael Rubin and the other prosecutors were driven by the need to win a much-publicized case at any cost, regardless of facts, logic, or justice. They simply did not care that the accused staffers were innocent. All that mattered was to salvage their reputations and their prestige.

Fifth, some minds cannot be changed. To this day, there are people who continue to insist that the molestations did occur and that Satanism is running amok on the playgrounds of America.

And finally, we are far too quick to assume that children "must be" telling the truth when they make such accusations - and far too ready to grant expertise to the psychological manipulators who have evoked these "hidden" memories through a variety of dubious techniques. Our worship of "experts" is woefully misguided, whether the experts are reclaiming lost memories, orating about global warming, or debunking the paranormal. Experts have egos, too - and often are more interested in their agenda than in the facts. Just like the prosecutors in the McMartin fiasco.

All of which brings us back to that HBO movie, Indictment. It is one of the most powerful films I've seen on any legal or political issue. Shot in a documentary style, the film traces the progress of the case from the early hysteria to later doubts, relying mainly on the vantage point of cynical defense counsel Danny Davis, played by James Woods. Woods' bravura performance receives strong support from Mercedes Ruehl as Lael Rubin, Lola Davidovich as the social worker who elicited the children's phony memories, and Henry Thomas (Eliot from E.T., now all grown up) as Ray Buckey. Actually, there's not a weak performance in the film; you know a movie is well cast when an actor of the caliber of James Cromwell  has a relatively minor role as a judge.

If you have any illusions about the justice system in this country, Indictment will wipe them away. This film is not an indictment of Ray Buckey and the other McMartin defendants, but of the system that did its best to destroy them for no good reason at all.

Comments

[william]

I have been studying the phenomena of paradigm paralysis for almost 20 years now and to me at least it is a fascinating subject. It is almost impossible to see the paralysis in our own paradigms but other’s paradigm paralysis are much easier to see. The Iraq war is a classic example of paradigm paralysis in action as was Vietnam. It appears to be human phenomena inherit in all humans to some degree.

Remember the nanny that went to jail for shaking a baby very hard and it was caught on video; it turns out that the video camera only took a frame every few seconds and just playing with the baby looked like abuse. You can bet her lawyer was court appointed.

How is it that judges have such a good reputation and lawyers don’t? Judges are former lawyers with black robes on. Paradigms again; our perception becomes reality. The paralysis in the paradigms of the ultra skeptics and the ultra religious appear to be the easiest to see. If anyone has not seen the video “the business of paradigms” by Joel barker check it out from a local library it is worth the time and effort.

[Bob Walace]

The belief in conspiracy theories as magical thinking. I'll have to give that some thought, but it sure does make sense.

Example: I've never understood the mindset of people who really believe there are superevil supergeniuses who remote-controlled four airplanes into the WTC, and also wired explosives into the building. Then they blamed all of it on Arabs, and completely vanished, without a trace.

Yep, it certainly does sound like childish magical thinking. But then, if people will believe in tunnels under daycare centers and human sacrifices, they'll believe in anything