The Moral Depravity of Martha Coakley

Post Reply New Topic

Martha Coakley's Convictions
The role played by the U.S. Senate candidate in a notorious sex case raises questions about her judgment

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
The story of the Amiraults of Massachusetts, and of the prosecution that had turned the lives of this thriving American family to dust, was well known to the world by the year 2001. It was well known, especially, to District Attorney Martha Coakley, who had by then arrived to take a final, conspicuous, role in a case so notorious as to assure that the Amiraults' name would be known around the globe.

The Amiraults were a busy, confident trio, grateful in the way of people who have found success after a life of hardship. Violet had reared her son Gerald and daughter Cheryl with help from welfare, and then set out to educate herself. The result was the triumph of her life—the Fells Acres school—whose every detail Violet scrutinized relentlessly. Not for nothing was the pre-school deemed by far the best in the area, with a long waiting list for admission.

All of it would end in 1984, with accusations of sexual assault and an ever-growing list of parents signing their children on to the case. Newspaper and television reports blared a sensational story about a female school principal, in her 60s, who had daily terrorized and sexually assaulted the pupils in her care, using sharp objects as her weapon. So too had Violet's daughter Cheryl, a 28-year old teacher at the school.

But from the beginning, prosecutors cast Gerald as chief predator—his gender qualifying him, in their view, as the best choice for the role. It was that role, the man in the family, that would determine his sentence, his treatment, and, to the end, his prosecution-inspired image as a pervert too dangerous to go free.

The accusations against the Amiraults might well rank as the most astounding ever to be credited in an American courtroom, but for the fact that roughly the same charges were brought by eager prosecutors chasing a similar headline—making cases all across the country in the 1980s. Those which the Amiraults' prosecutors brought had nevertheless, unforgettable features: so much testimony, so madly preposterous, and so solemnly put forth by the state. The testimony had been extracted from children, cajoled and led by tireless interrogators.

Martha Coakley, attorney general of Massachusetts, at a campaign stop, Jan. 13.
Gerald, it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury. Violet had tied a boy to a tree in front of the school one bright afternoon, in full view of everyone, and had assaulted him anally with a stick, and then with "a magic wand." She would be convicted of these charges. Cheryl had cut the leg off a squirrel.

Other than such testimony, the prosecutors had no shred of physical or other proof that could remotely pass as evidence of abuse. But they did have the power of their challenge to jurors: Convict the Amiraults to make sure the battle against child abuse went forward. Convict, so as not to reject the children who had bravely come forward with charges.

Gerald was sent to prison for 30 to 40 years, his mother and sister sentenced to eight to 20 years. The prosecutors celebrated what they called, at the time "a model, multidisciplinary prosecution." Gerald's wife, Patricia, and their three children—the family unfailingly devoted to him—went on with their lives. They spoke to him nightly and cherished such hope as they could find, that he would be restored to them.

Hope arrived in 1995, when Judge Robert Barton ordered a new trial for the women. Violet, now 72, and Cheryl had been imprisoned eight years. This toughest of judges, appalled as he came to know the facts of the case, ordered the women released at once. Judge Barton—known as Black Bart for the long sentences he gave criminals—did not thereafter trouble to conceal his contempt for the prosecutors. They would, he warned, do all in their power to hold on to Gerald, a prediction to prove altogether accurate.

No less outraged, Superior Court Judge Isaac Borenstein presided over a widely publicized hearings into the case resulting in findings that all the children's testimony was tainted. He said that "Every trick in the book had been used to get the children to say what the investigators wanted." The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly—which had never in its 27 year history taken an editorial position on a case—published a scathing one directed at the prosecutors "who seemed unwilling to admit they might have sent innocent people to jail for crimes that had never occurred."

It was clear, when Martha Coakley took over as the new Middlesex County district attorney in 1999, that public opinion was running sharply against the prosecutors in the case. Violet Amirault was now gone. Ill and penniless after her release, she had been hounded to the end by prosecutors who succeeded in getting the Supreme Judicial Court to void the women's reversals of conviction. She lay waiting all the last days of her life, suitcase packed, for the expected court order to send her back to prison. Violet would die of cancer before any order came in September 1997.

That left Cheryl alone, facing rearrest. In the face of the increasing furor surrounding the case, Ms. Coakley agreed to revise and revoke her sentence to time served—but certain things had to be clear, she told the press. Cheryl's case, and that of Gerald, she explained, had nothing to do with one another—a startling proposition given the horrific abuse charges, identical in nature, of which all three of the Amiraults had been convicted.

No matter: When women were involved in such cases, the district attorney explained, it was usually because of the presence of "a primary male offender." According to Ms. Coakley's scenario, it was Gerald who had dragged his mother and sister along. Every statement she made now about Gerald reflected the same view, and the determination that he never go free. No one better exemplified the mindset and will of the prosecutors who originally had brought this case.

Before agreeing to revise Cheryl's sentence to time served, Ms. Coakley asked the Amiraults' attorney, James Sultan, to pledge—in exchange—that he would stop representing Gerald and undertake no further legal action on his behalf. She had evidently concluded that with Sultan gone—Sultan, whose mastery of the case was complete—any further effort by Gerald to win freedom would be doomed. Mr. Sultan, of course, refused.

In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor's Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a commutation of Gerald's sentence. After nine months of investigation, the board, reputed to be the toughest in the country, voted 5-0, with one abstention, to commute his sentence. Still more newsworthy was an added statement, signed by a majority of the board, which pointed to the lack of evidence against the Amiraults, and the "extraordinary if not bizarre allegations" on which they had been convicted.

Editorials in every major and minor paper in the state applauded the Board's findings. District Attorney Coakley was not idle either, and quickly set about organizing the parents and children in the case, bringing them to meetings with Acting Gov. Jane Swift, to persuade her to reject the board's ruling. Ms. Coakley also worked the press, setting up a special interview so that the now adult accusers could tell reporters, once more, of the tortures they had suffered at the hands of the Amiraults, and of their panic at the prospect of Gerald going free.

On Feb. 20, 2002, six months after the Board of Pardons issued its findings, the governor denied Gerald's commutation.

Gerald Amirault spent nearly two years more in prison before being granted parole in 2004. He would be released, with conditions not quite approximating that of a free man. He was declared a level three sex offender—among the consequences of his refusal, like that of his mother and sister, to "take responsibility" by confessing his crimes. He is required to wear, at all times, an electronic tracking device; to report, in a notebook, each time he leaves the house and returns; to obey a curfew confining him to his home between 11:30 p.m. and 6 a.m. He may not travel at all through certain areas (presumably those where his alleged victims live). He can, under these circumstances, find no regular employment.

The Amirault family is nonetheless grateful that they are together again.

Attorney General Martha Coakley—who had proven so dedicated a representative of the system that had brought the Amirault family to ruin, and who had fought so relentlessly to preserve their case—has recently expressed her view of this episode. Questioned about the Amiraults in the course of her current race for the U.S. Senate, she told reporters of her firm belief that the evidence against the Amiraults was "formidable" and that she was entirely convinced "those children were abused at day care center by the three defendants."

What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley's concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.

If the sound of ghostly laughter is heard in Massachusetts these days as this campaign rolls on, with Martha Coakley self-portrayed as the guardian of justice and civil liberties, there is good reason.

Martha Coakley has been re-elected to another term as attorney general in Massachusetts less than a year after her stunning loss to Scott Brown in a special U.S. Senate election.

Coakley defeated Republican James McKenna in Tuesday’s voting. McKenna, an attorney and former prosecutor, had made it on the ballot by collecting more than the necessary 10,000 write-in votes in the September primary.

Justice, Not So Swift
Katha Pollitt
February 28, 2002

Governor Jane Swift of Massachusetts pardoned five women who had been convicted and executed in the Salem witch trials in 1692. Well, better late than never--what's a few centuries one way or another? Once you're dead you have all the time in the world. It's the living for whom justice delayed is justice denied, and on that score Governor Swift is not doing so well. On February 20 she rejected the recommendation of the state parole board, known for its sternness and strictness, and refused to commute the thirty-to-forty-year sentence of Gerald Amirault, who was convicted in the 1986 Fells Acre Day School child sex abuse case and who has already served sixteen years in prison. Violet Amirault and Cheryl Amirault LeFave, his mother and sister, who were convicted with him, served eight years before being released.

Since the l980s, when a wave of now notorious prosecutions of alleged ritual child sex abuse swept the country, many of the techniques used to elicit children's stories of abuse have been discredited: leading and coercive questions, multiple reinterviews, promises of rewards, suggestive use of anatomical dolls. It's no longer iron-clad doctrine that certain behaviors, like bed-wetting, masturbation and sexualized play, reliably indicate sex abuse. The slogan of the prosecution and the media was "believe the children"--but what that really meant was don't believe the children if they insist that nothing happened, if they like going to daycare and readily hug their alleged abusers; only believe the children when, after relentless questioning by interviewers, therapists and parents, they agree that something terrible happened and eventually come to believe it, as the Fells Acre children, now young adults, still do. As Dan Finneran, the Amiraults' lawyer until 2000, puts it, the case represents "a closed system of thought: denials, recantations and failure to remember are categorized as manifestations of repression and fear and thus stand as confirmations of actual abuse." If no means yes, and yes means yes, how do you say no?

All these issues featured in the Amirault case. The result was that a respected working-class family who had run a popular daycare center in Malden for twenty years--a place that parents were constantly popping in and out of--were convicted of a total of twenty-six counts of child abuse involving nine children in trials that included accusations of extravagant and flamboyant sadistic behavior: children being anally raped with butcher knives (which left no wounds), tied to trees on the front lawn while other teachers watched, forced to drink urine, thrown about by robots, tortured in a magic room by an evil clown. One child claimed sixteen children had been killed at the center. Obvious questions went unasked: How come no kids who went to Fells Acre in previous years had these alarming experiences? Why was an expert witness permitted to testify about a child-pornography ring when no pornographic photos of the Fells Acre kids were ever found?

Governor Swift made a big show of looking seriously and long at Gerald Amirault's case, but she failed to consider the central question, that of whether he was guilty of any crime. Indeed, Swift made Gerald's refusal to admit guilt and get treatment as a dangerous sexual predator a centerpiece of her decision--but why should an innocent man have to say he's guilty to get out of jail? Gerald has been a model prisoner: He's taken college courses, he has worked, he has a flawless record. He has the total support of his wife and children and a job lined up in anticipation of his release.

Swift claims that her main consideration was whether Amirault's sentence was in line with those of others convicted of similar crimes. She cited the case of Christopher Reardon, a lay Catholic church worker who pled guilty to seventy-five criminal counts of abusing twenty-nine boys last summer and received a forty-to-fifty-year sentence. But the case against Reardon was open and shut; he took photos and videos, and even kept spreadsheets detailing his crimes. The real cases to compare with Amirault's are those of his mother and sister, who were convicted of the same crimes, although slightly fewer of them. Cheryl Amirault LeFave and Violet Amirault received sentences half as long and were released after serving half as many years as Gerald. Does Gerald's being a man have something to do with these disparate outcomes? Absolutely. The women benefited from the leniency still--if fitfully--bestowed by the justice system on women. Moreover, as the case against the Amiraults came to look more and more troubling with hindsight, the original scenario, in which the three were equally involved in molesting children, was replaced by a theory, never put forward during the trials, that Gerald was the ringleader and the women his dupes. How could this be? The evidence against the three was the same.

At her press conference, Governor Swift refused to discuss the case against Gerald and three times declined to respond when asked how he had failed to demonstrate good behavior in prison. The clear implication is that her motives were political: With Massachusetts in an uproar over the ongoing scandal of pedophile priests, to commute Gerald Amirault's sentence would have made her vulnerable in November when, as a not very popular or experienced Republican appointee, she faces an uphill struggle for election. What an irony--the Catholic Church protects genuine child molesters for decades and thereby creates a political situation in which an innocent man is trapped in jail. But Swift's calculation is backfiring. The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor, the Berkshire Eagle in Swift's home county have all editorialized against her decision; polls show wide support for Amirault's release.

Massachusetts--liberal, modern, technocratic Massachusetts--is the only state in which people convicted in the 1980s wave of ritual child abuse cases are still in prison. Bernard Baran, whose case shares many features with that of the Amiraults, with the added strike against him of being homosexual, has been incarcerated for almost half his life. Meanwhile, Scott Harshbarger, the DA who originally prosecuted the Amirault case, is now head of Common Cause. Will it take another 300 years for the state to acknowledge that Salem was not its last miscarriage of justice?

That's pretty disturbing that you can be convicted of a crime, especially one as serious as that, without any evidence besides the testimony of the accuser, an toddler open to suggestion no less. I thought it was up the prosecution to prove guilt and not the other around.

On the subject of the Massachusetts senate seat, I think the democrats will likely take the seat back. Scott Brown actually leads all his opponents in the latest poll but it's close and he's under 50% which is always bad news for the incumbent. Apparently Barney Frank has expressed interest in the seat, he's a guy I think is divisive enough that Scott Brown might be able to pull off another upset. Scott Brown actually won Barny Franks district vs Coakley interestingly enough. Dems just need to find a Kennedy to run for the seat and they'll win it easily.

So just out of curiosity Master_Pedant, does this mean you would have voted for Scott Brown had you been able to?

On a side note, Martha Coakley is a friend of my family. Now, I didn't vote for her(since I'm in Missouri), but I thought her campaign was poorly run.

Could you persuade your family to tell Martha Coakley that she was wrong on Amirault case and to immediately petition for the freedom of Gerard Amirault? It'd do a world of good.

Martha Coakley’s Chappaquiddick
by Mark Rosenthal / January 11th, 2010

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, the Democratic nominee to replace Senator Ted Kennedy, ought to have a lock on the January 19th special election, considering that Massachusetts is a state that nearly always votes for a Democrat and that the Boston Herald reports1 that the RNC has decided to let her opponent fend for himself. Yet the latest polling2 shows Coakley only 9 points ahead, with a margin of error exactly equal to the spread between the two candidates. Perhaps the short attention span of the electorate is simply an over-hyped myth, and voters who remember Coakley’s actions in the case of Gerald Amirault feel that they call into question her fitness for the job. The Amirault name may well be Coakley’s albatross much as Chappaquiddick was Kennedy’s. But Coakley’s albatross and Kennedy’s are hardly birds of a feather.

The Chappaquiddick accident that took Mary Jo Kopechne’s life was just that – a tragic accident.3 In contrast, Attorney General Martha Coakley’s campaign to keep a falsely convicted man behind bars was intentional and politically motivated.

In the late 1970s, people uncomfortable with the increasing number of women in the workforce tried to guilt them into staying home by planting doubt about the safety of daycare centers. By the 1980s, this had turned into full-blown hysteria, with accusations of toddlers subjected to sexual abuse and satanic rituals. Prosecutors and supposed child experts nationwide fanned the hysteria, seeking to build their careers on the backs of the innocent. McMartin in L.A., Wee Care in N.J., Little Rascals in N.C., and Fells Acres in Mass. are the most notorious cases. Where prosecutors told jurors “believe the children,” the child abuse “experts” they brought in to interview the children refused to believe the children unless they made outrageous accusations.

Scott Harshbarger who prosecuted the Amiraults, owners of Fells Acres, parlayed the resulting fame into a successful run for the office of Massachusetts Attorney General.

Pediatric nurse Susan Kelley’s never-take-no-for-an-answer interview techniques elicited claims from Fells Acres children that:

1. a four year old boy was anally raped with a butcher knife that miraculously left no injury,
2. a young girl was bitten by a green and yellow and silver “Star Wars” robot,
3. a young boy was tied naked to a tree in the schoolyard, in front of all the teachers and children and in full view of passing traffic, while Cheryl cut the leg off a squirrel.

Even though the prosecution produced no physical evidence that the children’s stories were anything more than fantasies created under pressure from a sex-abuse obsessed interviewer, Gerald Amirault was sentenced to a 30 to 40 year prison term. His sister Cheryl and their mother Violet were sentenced to 8 to 20 years.

In a subsequent appeal, Judge Isaac Borenstein commented4 on Susan Kelley’s ceaseless badgering of the children: “This interviewer was so biased that she engaged in an investigation not to learn what really happened, but to make sure that the Amiraults were convicted.” Nevertheless, Kelley used the case as her Ph.D. thesis topic5 and went on to a successful career at Georgia State University where she now serves as Dean of the College of Health and Human Sciences.

Justice Charles Fried of the Mass. Supreme Judicial Court, whose understanding of the U.S. Constitution is so flawed that he rejected the Amiraults’ appeal6 on the basis that the most important thing for the court is “finality” of the decision, now holds the exalted post of Harvard Law School professor where he teaches, of all things, constitutional law!

After 8 years of appeals, Judge Robert A. Barton overturned the women’s conviction, but Gerald having been convicted in a separate trial remained in prison.

It seems the convictions were a win-win for everyone, except of course the Amiraults. Massachusetts’ abominable treatment of the Amirault family was chronicled by Dorothy Rabinowitz in her Pulitzer-prize winning series of Wall Street Journal articles “A Darkness In Massachusetts.”7 Unfortunately, Rabinowitz’ chronicle ends in July 2001, when the Massachusetts Governor’s Advisory Board, one of the toughest parole boards in the country, voted unanimously to commute Gerald Amirault’s sentence, stating that “real and substantial doubt exists concerning petitioner’s conviction.”

And that’s where ambition-driven District Attorney Martha Coakley enters the picture. By 2001, no person with two brain cells to rub together believed that the prosecution of the Amiraults was anything other than a travesty of justice. But Coakley, placing more value on defending the infallibility of her office and on appearing tough on crime than on seeing that injustice be rectified, embarked on a public-relations crusade to keep Gerald Amirault behind bars. As a result, Gerald languished in prison for another three years.

It wasn’t until 2004 that Gerald Amirault was finally paroled. If Coakley truly believed Gerald Amirault was guilty of sexually abusing children, then her decision not to have him classified as a sexually dangerous person shows absolute disregard for the welfare of the community. More likely, she chose not to have him classified as sexually dangerous because that would have required a hearing which would have been an embarrassment for the D.A.’s office. Revisiting the original accusations in a less hysterical era would have brought unwelcome media attention to the fact that her office was guilty of causing the imprisonment of a plainly innocent man for nearly two decades!

The citizens of Mass. saw fit to forgive Teddy Kennedy for a tragic accident, and he repaid them by zealously fighting for the average citizen throughout his career. In the upcoming election, the citizens of Massachusetts need to send a message loud and clear that Martha Coakley may well be heir to the legacy of Mike Nifong, but she’s no Teddy Kennedy!

On election day, many dyed-in-the-wool Democrats who can’t stomach the idea of elevating someone with Coakley’s lack of scruples to the U.S. Senate may feel there is no way for them to make their opinions heard and instead choose not to vote at all. That would be a mistake because there is a way for voters to express their distaste for the D.A.’s behavior. Massachusetts ballots allow write-in candidates. Even a small number of write-in votes for “Gerald Amirault” will send a powerful message – that the voters will neither forget nor forgive a prosecutor who campaigned to keep an innocent man in jail in order to further her own political career.