Title

No crueler tyrannies : accusation, false witness, and other terrors of our times

Description

No Crueler Tyrannies recalls the hysteria that accompanied the child sex-abuse witch-hunts of the 1980s and 1990s: how a single anonymous phone call could bring to bear an army of recovered-memory therapists, venal and ambitious prosecutors, and hypocritical judges - an army that jailed hundreds of innocent Americans. The overarching story of No Crueler Tyrannies is that of the Amirault family, who ran the Fells Acres day care center in Malden, Massachusetts: Violet Amirault, her daughter Cheryl, and her son Gerald, victims of perhaps the most biased prosecution since the Salem witch trials. Woven into the fabric of the Amirault tragedy an unfinished story - with Gerald Amirault still incarcerated for crimes that, Rabinowitz persuasively argues, not only did he not commit, but which never happened - are other, equally alarming tales of prosecutorial terrors: the stories of Wenatchee, Washington, where the single-minded efforts of chief sex crimes investigator Robert Perez jailed dozens of his neighbors; Patrick Griffin, a respected physician whose life and reputation were destroyed by a false accusation of sexual molestation; John Carroll, a marina owner from Troy, New York, now serving ten to twenty years largely at the behest of the same expert witness used to wrongly jail Kelly Michaels fifteen years previously; and Grant Snowden, the North Miami policeman sentenced to five consecutive life terms after being prosecuted by then Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno ... who spent eleven years killing rats in various Florida prisons before a new trial affirmed his innocence. "No Crueler Tyrannies is at once a truly frightening and at the same time inspiring book, documenting how these citizens, who became targets of the justice system in which they had so much faith, came to comprehend that their lives could be destroyed, that they could be sent to prison for years - even decades. No Crueler Tyrannies shows the complicity of the courts, their hypocrisy and indifference to the claims of justice, but also the courage of those willing to challenge the runaway prosecutors and the strength of those who have endured their depredations."--Jacket.

Identifier

1101329

743228340

Creator

Rabinowitz, Dorothy

Source

Brian Lamb Booknotes Collection

Gift of Brian Lamb, 2011.

Catalog record

Language

eng

Date

2003

Program air date: May 4, 2003

Publisher

Free Press

George Mason University. Libraries. Special Collections & Archives

Text

Transcription of Annotations
Notes on front and back endpapers refer to some of the alleged sexual abuse cases that are discussed in the book. They date from the 1980s and 1990s and were tried before the courts across the United States. The notes also include a list of names of allegedly abused children, their alleged abusers, detectives, police officers, expert witnesses, attorneys and judges, who were involved in these cases. -- Annotations by Brian Lamb in the margins and underlining of pertinent phrases throughout the book. -- Examples: p. 25: "That the wave of spectacular child abuse trials emerged in the 1980s was no accident. It had certainly been helped along by the Mondale Act of 1979 - legislation that brought a huge increase in funds for child protection agencies and legions to be employed as abuse investigators." -- p. 229: "The prosecutors' propensity to believe in the guilt of anyone accused of the crime of child sex abuse was overwhelming."

Subject

"Fells Acres Day Care (Firm)--Trials, litigation, etc."

"Child sexual abuse--Investigation--United States."

"Trials (Child sexual abuse)--United States."

"False testimony--United States."

"Child witnesses--United States."

"Interviewing in child abuse--United States."

Relation

Original Booknotes interview

Rights

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