Bernard Baran was 19 when he was accused of abusing children at a day care center — one of a spasm of such prosecutions in the 1980s. Baran was convicted on the testimony of the children despite the fact that videotapes showed children denying that he touched them and other referring to “prizes” promised for their confirming abuse.
In his trial, the prosecutor used an edited version of the tapes that cut out the statements of children denying that Baran, now 42, touched them. In overturning the conviction, the court cited the ineffective counsel of the defense counsel and the new evidence. There is no mention of the prosecutor who used heavily edited tapes. On the tapes, children repeated deny the allegations but are asked over and over again until they change their statements. One child demands the promised prize for saying that Baran touched him. Presumably, the prosecutor saw these tapes but proceeded to introduce highly misleading and edited versions. There should be an immediate inquiry to determine the facts of what the prosecutor and police knew in this case.
It is rare for courts or the media to confront prosecutors or police who win at any cost in cases later overturned. Baran does not know if he will sue, but he should.
For the full story, click here.
Quite simply, if the prosecutor and/or the police knew of the evidence, they should spend the next 21 years in prison.
That’s equity.
That’s fair.
That’s justice.
Remember folks, an eye for an eye ISN’T about revenge.
It’s about parity.
Parity is a requirement for justice. The flip side of “do unto others”. And parity is in short supply in the America right now.
21 years a piece is a fair sentence if they knowingly sent an innocent man to prison for 21 years. And it is no more cruel or unusual or disproportionate than what the bad systemic actors did to this man.
Mr. Baran should sue them until he owns the fillings in their teeth.
“In overturning the conviction, the court cited the ineffective counsel of the defense counsel and the new evidence. There is no mention of the prosecutor who used heavily edited tapes.”
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Excuse me, but how was the heavily edited tape ineffective assistance of counsel? What new evidence is proffered? It was there all of the time. The Prosecutor and edit(or), should be sued in a Tort called Intentional Infliction of Emotional Harm, False Imprisonment, Perjury, Criminal Assault and/or Battery etc.
Boston Globe, May 16, 2009:
“Videotaped interviews of the children used by a prosecutor to get an indictment had been edited to remove statements supporting Baran’s innocence, the appeals court said.
“And the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Daniel A. Ford, now a superior court judge, whipped up the jury’s passions in his closing argument when he likened Baran working at the day-care center to a “chocoholic in a candy store.”
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/05/16/decision_stands_in_day_care_case/
Commonwealth v. Baran:
http://www.freebaran.org/Appeals%20Court%20Decision.pdf
What a damn shame that this doesn’t surprise me. With liberty and justice for all my ass.
What happens to the corrupt prosecutors?
They become judges and congressman.
And we wonder why our country is in such sad shape.
Back in the 80’s there was a whole rash of bogus child abuse cases that wrecked many lives unjustly and led parents to believe their children were in constant danger. This coincided with the years I worked in Child Welfare and these cases kept my blood pressure boiling and my letters to editors coming as I saw the techniques used to question the children. I’ve been trained to question small children and am quite good at it, but the problem is that most children up at least until the age of six are overly suggestible and involved in “magical thinking.”
Great subjects to be manipulated by publicity hungry prosecutors and police, who let their own imaginations run away with them.
Well said, Mike S.
Yea, what BIL said.
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BIL: “Mr. Baran should sue them until he owns the fillings in their teeth.”
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Didn’t you mean to add ‘unto the seventh generation’? Just askin’ cause it seems fair to me.
Mike S. –
Being aware of your experience in this area, there is a documentary (I haven’t yet seen it) produced and narrated by Sean Penn called ‘Witch Hunt’ about a small town prosecution wrongly accusing and convicting dozens of people for this same type of crime. Child abuse is a real problem, but the use of coercive tactics with children in order to get a conviction and a ‘win’ is a shame on the prosecutors and law enforcement.
I’m not sure I could watch it because it sounds like something that would anger me so much.
What a nightmare for those accused …
Men have all but exited the child care field entirely, and who can blame them? It is far safer to not be near children at all, lest you wind up like Mr. Baran.
I’m not sure if a retrial is in the cards, but very recently the Boston Globe discussed the question: “Would you leave your child with a male caregiver?” It does not look good for the defendant based on the viewpoints of the potential Massachusetts jury pool.
The responses show that most women feel that men who would voluntarily want to work in the field must have ulterior motives:
http://www.boston.com/community/moms/blogs/child_caring/2009/06/would_you_leave_your_child_with_a_male_caregiver.html
A typical comment: One bad apple? No, it’s not one bad apple that gave us these feelings. It’s an orchard of bad apples throughout the even just the past five years that give us our “gut feeling” that men should not be caregivers to children. Fathers yes, at home, not in a daycare. I would pull my kids in a heartbeat
It is sad for the children who were implanted false memories also, because it can affect them psychologically, if the false belief stays with them.
“Child abuse is a real problem, but the use of coercive tactics with children in order to get a conviction and a ‘win’ is a shame on the prosecutors and law enforcement.”
Mojo,
I’ve learned that we can never underestimate the ability of self righteous people to rationalize their own misbehavior. Most of us are disgusted by child abuse, many times even the abusers, so when confronted with the possibility the thirst for revenge and punishment reigns. Add to that our system for choosing prosecutors politically and the political benefits to an ambitious prosecutor of winning a notorious case. You get a mixture of self righteous anger and a drive to prove the case at any cost.
This all came together in the mid to late 80’s in a perfect storm, abetted by the media and by the so-called experts who got themselves and the names of their non-profits in the news. The public freaked and suspicion was cast everywhere. They didn’t set out to “coerce” the children into making statements, the problem was the age of the children made their own statements subject to questioning and suggestion.
In child abuse investigation the best evidence is physical evidence, when dealing with a child under age 6.
Understand too, that although I have been a lifetime ACLU supporter, when it comes to child abuse my punishment views are draconian. That reflects though the need for a beyond a reasonable doubt certainty of guilt. In many cases like this the standard wasn’t met due to the media driven public uproar.
As for Sean Penn’s documentary “Witch Hunt,” I personally probably wouldn’t watch it. I have seen too many things in my life in my different areas of work, that average people would call horrors. They are imprinted in my mind and so I avoid re-tellings either in documentary or fictional form. The years I worked in child abuse coincided with those I was raising young daughters and my work affected my relationship with them, which I regret. I was a very good father, but not one who was big with hugging, directly due to my training in sexual abuse. It made my showing affection less spontaneous with my girls, than it need have been. Now they are both adults and the time is passed. Thankfully, my other parental qualities and those of my wife have blessed us with our great children.
However, to illustrate the effect of that work I still clearly remember sitting at my desk and reading the murder report of a four year old boy by his father, written up by my best worker. The tragedy was such that something broke in me and I lay my head down on my desk and began to weep loudly, with wracking sobs. The many workers around came over to me
concerned and it took me a few minutes to compose myself, before I could explain to them what was going on. I’ll spare you the details of that case from 25 years ago, but the facts are still etched in my mind, out of literally hundreds of cases I have worked on.
“It is better that a hundred guilty go free rather than one innocent be punished”.
I have heard or read statements equivalent to the above so many times that I have lost count, but I seriously doubt that society as a whole really believes them. A better expression of the sentiments of a society such as that of the US where moral panic is a prime motivator is “It is better that a hundred innocent be convicted rather than one guilty go unpunished.” This latter sentiment is especially strong in the case of withcraft crimes.
From the late middle ages and up to the seventeenth century Christendom was threatened by an appalling epidemic of witchcraft and heresy. The danger was that Hell would open up and swallow the Earth and that the forces of Evil would tear down the walls of heaven butcher all the saints and angels and finally torture God to death. Obvious the accidental legal killing of a few hundred people mistakenly thought to be witches or heretics was preferable to letting one witch escape to trigger the Apocalypse. In this situation it was important that the mechanism for catching and punishing witches was as efficient as possible and the way to do this was to ensure that denunciation led inevitably to conviction and execution. But such a system inevitably convicts the mistakenly accused, this is a cost that has to be borne. Even if an accused person really is not a witch acquittal sends a bad message as there will always be those who believe that the acquitted person really was a witch and acquittals have a demoralizing effect on these good people.
Sadly concern with witchcraft and heresy is no longer fashionable, but luckily there are other “witchcraft issues”, namely illegal mind altering drugs, child sexual abuse and terrorism. In cases of accusations of any of these crimes the same requirement for efficient movement from accusation to conviction applies and such nonsense as the presumption of innocence must be dispensed with.
It is right that the defense lawyer did an appalling job, to make a serious effort to defend a witch is something no decent lawyer does, it is also right that the prosecution edited out of the video of the children’s interrogation anything that might let any non right-thinking members of society who had managed to get on the jury justify reasonable doubt.
In addition to the community interest in convictions that I have discussed above individual actors in the legal system, prosecutors, police and child psychologists have personal interests that legitimately push them to do (merely technically) improper things. These people have to go out of their way to make sure they do nothing that might give rise to the thoughts in the minds of others that they may have a sneaking sympathy with witches or paedophiles which honoring requirements for fairness or due process would do. Making sure that their manner of prosecuting the case makes a statement of implacable hatred of child molesters is the way to do this.
It is sad that this
In my previous post ignore the last incomplete sentence. I forgot to delete the words “It is sad that this” after inserting several paragraphs before these words that I had forgotten that I had typed.
CM,
Don’t sweat the editing. Nice job.
Thanks Buddah, I appreciate it when someone enjoys my high octane sarcasm.
Read about the on-going Mineola, Tx. swingers club case.
Pardon Me?
http://www.kltv.com/global/story.asp?s=10829113
Here is the link and I may know the DA Matt. But not in that regards. But then again something I have never tried in life.
Texas Monthly wrote about it in April 2009 and is continuing to do so.
Texas Legislature Online:
81(R) HB 4090 – Introduced version – Bill Text
Author: Farrar
Caption: Relating to electronically recording certain interrogations and the admissibility of certain statements made by a juvenile or a criminal defendant.
Excerpt: SECTION 5. Section 51.095, Family Code, is amended by amending Subsections (a), (c), and (f) and adding Subsections (g), (h), and (i) to read as follows: (a) Notwithstanding Section 51.09, the statement of a child is admissible in evidence in any future proceeding concerning the matter about which the statement was given if: (1) the statement is made in writing under a circumstance described by Subsection (d) and: (A) the statement shows that the child has at some time before the making of …
81(R) SB 116 – Introduced version – Bill Text
Author: Ellis
Caption: Relating to electronically recording certain interrogations and the admissibility of certain statements made by a juvenile or a criminal defendant.
Excerpt: SECTION 5. Section 51.095, Family Code, is amended by amending Subsections (a), (c), and (f) and adding Subsections (g), (h), and (i) to read as follows: (a) Notwithstanding Section 51.09, the statement of a child is admissible in evidence in any future proceeding concerning the matter about which the statement was given if: (1) the statement is made in writing under a circumstance described by Subsection (d) and: (A) the statement shows that the child has at some time before the making of …
Mike S. -
I only just got back to this thread. I was a kid in the 80’s but I remember well the fear that was generated by the cases brought against the child-care workers during that time. That was probably the first I had ever heard of ‘child-abuse’.
As far as your own experience, I can only imagine the stress of that kind of work, and it reminds me of another kid I knew at that time who’s father was a cop. He told me his father sometimes suffered from depression. It didn’t make much sense to me at the time; a tough cop afraid of nothing was the only image I could conjure, but over the years I’ve come to understand the kinds of things some people have to see and experience in their line of work, and the depression the man suffered from makes much more sense now, as does the bad moment you experienced reading the details of that case.
Mojo,
There is a similarity with police work in the sense that you
view people’s words with suspicion and lose trust in general. I’m luckily not the type emotionally to get depressed per se, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t feel despair at the human condition, painful empathy with those abused and have a tendency towards untoward cynicism. To keep ones thoughts positive, in the light of so much human misery, then or today, requires much effort. I work at it every day because I also feel that a positive, optimistic outlook helps in keeping a person (hopefully me)alive for longer. The other side to that is that rage at the inequities and horror of human life is ultimately unproductive and makes you part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. Indignation though is a more helpful emotion and thought process, that has less wear and tear on one’s organism.
Carlyle,
As usual you provide an excellent context which clarifies the
process via analogy. The entire Witchcraft history in Europe is
directly related to the phenomenon of the rash of interest in child abuse in the US in the 80’s. The same phenomenon under a different guise.
Charles MacKay’s “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” has an excellent section on the with Craze.
the Amazon entry is http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Delusions-Confusi%C3%B3n-Confusiones-Marketplace/dp/0471133124.
Humans seem to have a deep psychological and social need to find scapegoats and to hunt them and punish them and this explains the witch craze, the heresy craze, the German Jewish holocaust, the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, the massacres of indigenous peoples in all colonial settler countries and the massacres of the descendants of freed slaves in the US.
The motive in all these cases is righteous hate and the US in particular seems to have an excess of it. Chronic fear is another motivating factor of which the US has too much.
When these factors are present people are unhappy until they have found a readily identifiable scapegoat group to hunt. This group must be easily differentiable from the respectable majority. In the US scapegoat groups include niggers, liberals, drug users and traffickers, terrorists and sex criminals. People enjoy the catharsis of forming a mob with pitchforks and fire brands and hunting scapegoats.
I suspect that the US is about to enter a period of fascist rule which might be as short as 5 or as long as a hundred years. Expect the right to seize power, I do not believe they are going to tolerate the Obama administration for much longer even though Obama is as much a panderer to corporate power and the rich as George W Bush was. too many white Americans find it unacceptable that their present be half Negro
I have noticed that most threads on JT’s blogs get a small number of posts but that a few generate much greater numbers. Usually the threads with large numbers of posts are about contentious issues. This thread is on a contentious issue but I am surprised at the small numbers of posts.
I speculate that some issues like this one generate so much anxiety that people hesitate to enter the discussion.
Mike.
“As for Sean Penn’s documentary “Witch Hunt,” I personally probably wouldn’t watch it. I have seen too many things in my life in my different areas of work, that average people would call horrors.”.
I speculate that one of the reasons that some people become extreme right-wingers is to distance themselves psychologically from the misery of which this world has so much and which so affected you as you have indicated in the above quote.
Perceiving other people’s misery can be painful. One technique to avoid the pain is to not notice the miserable conditions in the first place, another is to convince oneself that the people involved are both evil and subhuman and that their pain is both self-inflicted and deserved. In particular one must at all costs avoid the there but for the grace of God go I thought.
What CM said, although I think the hold of fascism will be toward the shorter end of the 100 year spectrum. Fascism is one of the most malfunctioning models available, lower than absolute monarchy but only slightly more functional than a theocracy and just as self-destructive. I give it a maximum of 15 years. 25 at the outside. Corporatists and politicians (of any flavor) who kowtow to them will start being directly harmed by and in conflict with the general populace much sooner than that.
That is, of course, assuming the government or a corporation doesn’t do something stupid enough to kill everyone in the mean time.
“Perceiving other people’s misery can be painful. One technique to avoid the pain is to not notice the miserable conditions in the first place, another is to convince oneself that the people involved are both evil and subhuman and that their pain is both self-inflicted and deserved. In particular one must at all costs avoid the there but for the grace of God go I thought.”
Carlyle,
That is quite true. I’ve never been good at self deception and because of the pain of my own childhood I am highly empathic. One makes choices though and those choices come in youth and only spread in complexity as one ages. Because I was a very smart, shy child, with a vocabulary influenced by reading a lot of Sir Walter Scott, I was picked on by many of the other boys. While I would fight off attacks, it was usually through copious tears of frustration. I was therefore often called Fairy, Faggot, Sissy etc. In the terms you described many make the choice to identify with their oppressors and thus become aides to thugs and bullies. My choice, consciously made at a young age was to identify with those oppressed like me. From those years, around the age of seven my self developed mantra was “Don’t hurt little people,”
with the corollary responsibility to protect them if I could.
That has become the story of my life and as I became older, stronger and more capable a human being, that’s what I’ve done.
As an analogy to my resistance to watching certain films I would offer Ingmar Bergmann’s “Virgin Spring.” An all time great movie that if you’ve seen it once, you never have to see it again. Carlyle, when it comes to human misery I’ve seen it all, except walking through death camps aiding survivors. All of it is indelibly etched in my mind and it is with me always. I personally believe that what keeps me living is maintaining a hopefulness about the future and that of my progeny, to maintain that optimism in the face of the human misery I’ve seen is a delicate balance that either I walk every day, or blow my brains out.
With hunts and witches are not mutually exclusive, when the hue and cry is out the safest option for a witch is to be among the front ranks of the village mob with a burning torch in one hand and a pitchfork in the other yelling “burn the witch” at the top of his/her lungs.
I suspect that most men are secretly afraid of an accusation of child abuse because they know possible unconsciously how the witch hunt works, that accusation leads inevitably to conviction or at least social humiliation and suspicion. In addition many men have the fear that they might at some time absent mindedly as it wore molest a child. The sexually attractive female form as exemplified by the anorexic models of the fashion industry is not that of an adult woman rather that of a pre-age-of-consent school girl with the careers of some super models starting at ages as early as 12.
This explains much of the hysteria about the 80’s child abuse panics. Those doing the investigation and prosecution feel the need to deny that they are sexually interested in children and to do so before any accusation has been made, but they cannot come out and deny the not yet made accusation as that would have the opposite effect to that desired. Thus they attempt to imply an extreme hostility to those who would abuse children by implication by conducting their investigation determined to get a conviction regardless of the facts.
In some of the cases there may have been abuse, but the questioning of the children in an abusive and browbeating manner is analogous to someone having a fossil with such a delicate pattern that he thinks others won’t be able to see it and then uses a chisel to deepen the lines of the pattern but in doing so leaves the question as to whether the pattern existed before he emphasized it unanswerable.
I am thinking about a particular case that happened in Australia. The children whose statements started the investigation were from a family known to my parents. Because of Australia’s draconian libel laws I will not say enough to identify the case. The investigation however was a typical witch hunt with suggestive and abusive questioning of children contaminating their recollections to the extent that prosecution was impossible.
Buddah.
I still find it odd that the US did not enter World War II on the axis side. Fascist tendencies have been present from the beginning but in the last 10 years they have increased markedly.
Oh dear another typo, I meant “Witch hunt” not “With hunt”.
“I still find it odd that the US did not enter World War II on the axis side. Fascist tendencies have been present from the beginning but in the last 10 years they have increased markedly.”
CM,
Had it not been for General Smedley Butler, FDR and Pearl Harbor they very well might have.
CM,
What Mike said.
Radley Balko whose blog is http://www.theagitator.com/ and who also posts at Reason Online http://reason.com/ posted a good article on this issue at Reason Online on 2009/08/17.
The link to it follows:-
http://reason.com/news/show/135474.html.
He considers the misconduct by the prosecutor in this case and the failure to do anything about it. The former prosecutor is now a superior court judge.
Via Radley Balko’s blog the agitator, here is a link to a much more detailed account of Bernard, Baran’s wrongful conviction.
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2009/08/accused-convicted-assaulted-raped-but.html.