-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.24/pageone.html ----- Laissez Faire City Times June 14, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 24 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ------------------------------------------------------- Witch Hunt: a True Story a book review by Lauren Bain Kathryn Lyon left her comfortable life as a Tacoma, Washington public defender to observe the proceedings of the now-notorious Wenatchee sex-ring prosecutions. In her ten years with the Pierce County Public Defender's Office, she had earned the accolade of sexual abuse expert from her colleagues. Gradually, strange news, sparse but horrific, dribbled in from sunny Wenatchee. Scores of dull-witted people were raping their children on church altars. . .a pastor who ran the food bank was the ring leader. . .good God, they were doing it in sunglasses. . . . "Check it out, Kathy," her boss suggested. And Lyon left her husband and son at home to take up residence on the other side of the Cascade Mountains in a shoe-box apartment overlooking a quiet street and a sagey hill. Lyon enjoyed the quiet, Spartan life of a writer abroad—Wenatchee might as well have been Tangier. She also enjoyed a modicum of trust, like an anthropologist of the participant-observer school. Lyon did not participate in the defense of the 43 people accused of bizarre sexual acts with some 100 children. She studied court records, interviewed witnesses, and maintained a low profile--for a while. As her observations quickly turned to criticism of police and social service agency motives and methods, Lyon found her own safety and liberty in jeopardy. Her activism became a beacon for outside media, including Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal. Nonplussed by the abuses they encountered, reporters dug in to probe the worst prosecutorial atrocities committed in the name of children's safety since California's 18-month-long McMartin trials. Witch Hunt chronicles the arrests of 43 defendants on more than 30,000 graphic counts of sexual molestation of more than 100 children. Lyon methodically sequences the events, arrests, trials, and aftermath of the entire four-year Wenatchee sex-ring scandal. Her eloquent writing balances a light-handed rationality with the profound outrage her material warrants. Her background information appropriately draws on the Salem witch trials of 1692. Twenty Salem women were executed as witches in 1692. These women were convicted on the basis of "spectral evidence", the testimony of wide-eyed young girls in trances who "described frightening visions of specters who pinched, bit, pricked, or threatened them." These convictions pre-dated the Bill of Rights—and constitutional safeguards, one would reason, should preclude a recurrence of such appalling injustice. But spectral evidence remains dearer than liberty to the harpies of children's safety. Modern therapeutic techniques, most notably repressed memory evidence, revive the spirit of old Salem Town. Today's spectral evidence can be deployed against virtually anyone in the name of children's safety. Such evidence includes "repressed memories" and coerced confessions from suggestible children and vulnerable adults. The adjunct theory, predictably, is that all skeptics are child abusers. Three hundred years after the Salem trials, the Wenatchee sex-ring prosecutions began in 1992, with the arrest of mentally disabled parents Harold and Idella Everett. Their daughter, Ann, became the foster daughter of the Wenatchee police department's sex-ring investigator, Detective Robert Perez. The obvious conflict of interest inherent in Detective Perez's foster daughter being one of the state's chief witnesses daunted only a few naysayers in Wenatchee social service circles; those were threatened with prosecution. Saving the Children Fueled by panic and prejudice, the investigations billowed, ultimately resulting in more than 40 arrests involving over 30,000 incidents of sexual abuse, the displacement of more than 100 children from their homes, mind-altering drugs and memory therapy inflicted on those children, and more than 20 convictions brought about by Alford pleas (in which the defendant does not admit guilt but concedes that the State has sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction; the plea approximates a nolo contendere) and forced confessions. "Forced" here means: "If you sign this, you'll get a light sentence or even get to go home. If you don't sign this, you will never see your children again." Of the more than 30 individuals incarcerated, several were of subnormal intelligence, and many received sentences exceeding 40 years. Detective Perez perfected his local-hero strut. In 1697, Salem declared a Day of Fast and Repentance to express contrition for the execution of its innocent women. In 1997, Lyon and several freed and acquitted defendants from the Wenatchee Witch Hunt attended the 300th anniversary of the Day of Fast and Repentance in Salem. Arthur Miller, author of The Crucible and victim of the McCarthy-era inquisition's broad sweep, spoke via videotape at the ceremony. Miller named child sexual abuse allegations as the contemporary version of the Salem witch hunt. "You can attribute all kinds of motives to it," he said at the anniversary ceremony. "Ambition, bureaucracy, a suspension of the moral beliefs of the person...[but] there are indeed people, for whatever reasons, or for no reason at all, who will perpetrate evil, who will proceed with a case even if they know that the thing is cooked up, that it is empty, and will persist to the end, and put people in jail for long years....If that didn't exist you wouldn't have the other problems connected with false confessions." Since Witch Hunt's publication, appeals of Wenatchee sex-ring defendants have resulted in seven overturned convictions. Six cases await decisions in the state court of appeals. The state legislature churned out a few new rules for interview procedures. DSHS investigations continue. With the exception of Roby and Connie Roberson regaining custody of their daughter, Rebekah, none of the parents who have been released following appeal have been reunited with their children. Their children remain in foster care as state dependents despite their parents' resolute efforts to regain custody. Eleven convicted defendants remain in prison, and the Northwest Innocence Project, a Seattle-based group consisting of 60 attorneys, law professors, and law students continue to work tirelessly for justice and the defendants' appeals. Child sexual abuse, Lyon writes without equivocation, is horrendous; and, unlike witchcraft, this crime is a reality. The most dangerous thing about this reality is the tendency for the public to justify nearly limitless government powers to protect its young. Lyon quotes Dr. Richard A. Gardner, clinical professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University: "The problem with false sex abuse accusations is that there will always be sexual abuse. It is a wonderful delusion for hystericals and paranoids, because you can't say it doesn't exist. It's so ubiquitous. It's unique because there's no end in sight. It's the greatest hysteria on earth." Wenatchee's prosecutions were terrible for their sheer numbers, but the scenario really is not unique. Lyon shines her cool, documented light on Janet Reno's own track record with child sexual abuse witch hunts in her murky Florida past. Lyon's book is a compelling testimonial to the principle that a government that would abuse its citizens so egregiously clearly should not be given the power to do so. Her book is a significant contribution to the body of civil libertarian investigative journalism. Witch Hunt is as valuable for its insight into the mechanisms of child abuse hysteria as it is for its impeccable chronicling of the Wenatchee cases. If the slow wheels and willful blindness of our justice system ever catch up with Lyon's courage and logic, Wenatchee and its counterparts around the country might yet see a Day of Fast and Repentance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Kathryn Lyon: Witch Hunt: A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice, Avon, NY, 1998, 470 pp. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Lauren Bain ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is a Seattle-area attorney, Libertarian, and a columnist/book reviewer for the Association of Objectivist Businessmen News. -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 24, June 14, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------- Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. 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