Americans of a certain age will remember the day-care sex abuse hysteria that swept the nation during the 1980s and early 1990s. It began with bizarre allegations in California that children were being sexually abused and tortured by day-care workers in Satanic rituals. The hysteria resulted in a rash of trials, including the McMartin Preschool trial, several prosecutions in California and Florida, and the infamous Fells Acres/Amirault and Bernard Baran cases in Massachusetts, in both of which co-author Harvey Silverglate served as co-counsel. Over the years, new evidence has emerged that the alleged abuse was planted in the young accusers’ minds by terrified parents, unprofessional social workers and often-corrupt prosecutors. All but a few of the accused have been exonerated or had their verdicts overturned in post-conviction legal proceedings. Even the mainstream press, early cheerleaders for the witch-hunts, has finally come around to realizing the enormity of the injustice. Dorothy Rabinowitz, the leading Fourth Estate investigative columnist who showed that the prosecutorial emperor had no clothes, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 in large part for her work in exposing the fraud of these prosecutions.
Not every case involved day care centers. There were many lesser-known accusations of sexual and ritual abuse of young children that resulted in unjust convictions, many of which remain uncorrected today. Among those still in prison are Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, Anna Vasquez and Cassandra Rivera, who have come to be known as the “San Antonio Four.” Accused in 1994 of repeatedly raping Ramirez’s two nieces, then 7 and 9 years old, when the girls spent the week at Ramirez’s apartment, Mayhugh, Vasquez and Rivera are twelve years into a 15-year sentence. Ramirez was accused of being the ringleader, so she received 37 ½ years. All four of the women refused pretrial plea deals that would have greatly reduced their sentences, three have passed polygraph tests on their claims of innocence, and three have refused parole offers conditioned on an admission of guilt and completion of a “rehabilitation” course for sex offenders. (It is one of the ironies of this area of criminal law that many innocent convicts remain in prison precisely because their consciences do not allow them to engage in the ritual mea culpa demanded by parole boards before release can even be contemplated.)
Now, almost twenty years after the accusations, there are signs of progress in this case long thought to be closed. On November 2nd, Anna Vasquez was released on parole—likely because the parole board came to trust the veracity of a polygraph she submitted to them attesting to her innocence. In September, one of the accusers recanted, saying she now seems to recall a quiet, even boring, weekend with her aunt, her sister and her aunt’s friends. She has vowed to do everything in her power to help exonerate the four women still imprisoned as a result of her earlier false accusations.
The injustices of this case are glaring, and the whole sordid situation bears remarkable similarities to other now-disproven crimes.
Like numerous other cases, the girls’ stories changed each time they told them to investigators. There were two trials, one for Ramirez and one for her three friends, and both of the girls told different stories at each trial. One of the girls said she had two guns held to her head while talking on the phone to her parents so that she wouldn’t ask them for help. At the next trial, she testified that there was only one gun. Her sister testified that there was no gun, only verbal threats, until a prosecutor suggestively asked her about weapons. A police search of Ramirez’s apartment did not find any guns, nor was there any record of her ever having owned one. Indeed, police found absolutely no physical evidence to corroborate any of the girls’ claims about weapons, nor anything else.
Following the day-care hysteria pattern, the expert brought in by prosecutors in the San Antonio Four case relied on science that had already been discredited by the time of trial. The prosecution called Dr. Nancy Kellogg as their expert witness. She testified that spots she noticed while examining the girls’ hymens could only have been caused by the abuse the girls claimed they had experienced. While such spots were once considered to be the direct result of vaginal penetration, that notion had been widely discredited within the medical community by the time of the trials. Kellogg claimed to have taken six photographs of the girls’ hymens with a colposcope, yet refused to turn them over to the defense team, claiming they had gone into long-term storage and were therefore too difficult to access. In her medical reports, Kellogg wrote that she had spoken with investigators and prosecutors about the possibility that the sexual abuse described by the girls may have been related to some sort of Satanic rituals.
Like in the Fells Acres/Amirault case in Massachusetts, prosecutors raised the specter of Satanism at trial. The prosecutors themselves, while not permitted to raise the possibility of Satanism directly, nonetheless made their suppositions known. One prosecutor’s opening statements described how the girls were “sacrificed to the altar of lust.” When insinuations of Satanism proved to be a dead end, prosecutors and even the judge made suggestive remarks about the sexuality of the defendants, as was done in the Massachusetts Baran case, where prosecutor, judge and even the defense lawyer commented on the defendant’s sexual orientation. The prosecutors made repeated reference to the “alternative lifestyle” of the four women. Two jurors were known to be homophobic. At one point, Ramirez’s sister testified that her ex-husband, the father of the accusers, beat her in front of their daughters. After disallowing this testimony, the judge told the court reporter, “She probably got beat up because he found out she was a lesbian.”
Also similar to so many others of this genre of case, there was a clear ulterior motive behind the children’s accusation. Though they were never entered as evidence at trial, Elizabeth Ramirez had several love letters from the accusers’ father, which showed both her rejection of his repeated advances and his intolerance of her sexuality. The young girls’ vindictive father had previously shown himself more than willing to employ false accusations of rape by his children in order to get what he wanted. In the midst of a custody dispute with the girls’ mother two years before the San Antonio accusation, the girls made rape accusations against a 10-year-old boy with whom their mother allegedly left them home alone. Later, when the girls’ mother remarried, the girls accused their new step-grandfather of sexual assault during yet another custody battle. As with the San Antonio case, there was no physical evidence to corroborate either of these prior accusations.
The allegations against the San Antonio Four were horrifying, so horrifying that a jury convicted all four women despite a dearth of evidence that the allegations were true. A look at the full panoply of facts, especially the recent recantation by one of the accusers, demonstrates that the guilty verdicts were almost certainly reached in error, and obviously in violation of all conceptions of fairness. Oftentimes the process to reverse such verdicts requires a motion for a new trial and years of legal wrangling.
Most defendants in the position of the San Antonio Four go entirely un-noticed. Their screams simply are not loud enough, unaided, to overcome the obstacles to overturning wrongful convictions. In this case, the defendants were fortunate enough to come to the attention of The National Center for Reason and Justice, a non-profit, public-interest outfit that investigates cases that come to its attention and then sponsors those that meet its criteria. (Disclosure: Harvey Silverglate is on the Board of Advisors of NCRJ.)
The difficulties encountered in attempting to re-examine and challenge clearly erroneous verdicts have been compounded in recent decades by limitations in the ease with which post-conviction legal review is available. In the federal system, severe restrictions have been imposed on the ancient writ of habeas corpus, a common law doctrine predating the U.S. Constitution by several centuries, which allows the wrongly convicted to attack their trials and verdicts. And some state systems have elevated “finality” over truth, fairness and justice, on the theory that society is entitled to see an end to prosecutions, notwithstanding questions as to the results and how they were achieved. (Indeed, the Amirault defendants in Massachusetts remain convicted in their ritual abuse prosecution, now totally discredited among rational people, because the state’s Supreme Judicial Court appears to have tired of revisiting the case and clamped down the appellate lid by announcing a finality doctrine. As retired Chief Justice Charles Fried reasoned in his opinion denying the Amiraults a new trial, “once the process has run its course—through pretrial motions, trial, post-trial motions and one or two levels of appeal—the community’s interest in finality comes to the fore.”)
One can only hope that in the glare of the flagrant injustices the San Antonio Four case presents, the courts recognize the imperative of freeing these four women and moving us one step closer to rehabilitating all of the many lives ruined by a decades-old witch hunt for sexual assaults that never happened.
(Zachary Bloom, Silverglate’s research assistant, co-wrote this piece.)
