|
Rafay/Burns
| Wilfred Hathway | Kyle
Unger | James Driskell
| Ludrate Burton | Michael
Williams | Shaka Sankofa:
Executed after conviction based on faulty eye-witness | U.S.
wrongful convictions: recently Exonerated Peter
Rose | Clifford St. Joseph
| Albert Johnson | Stephen
Cowans | Laurence Adams
| Peter Reilly | Marty
Tankleff | Still working on it: | Dennis
Deschaine | Dennis Perry
| Dwayne McKinney | The
trend in 2004 is to entrap innocent persons by sucking them into
fictitious criminal conspiracies and then using leverage (fear
of death) to extract "confessions. See Rafay/Burns
| Wilf Hathway | Or to find
a vulnerable person and intimidate them 17 years after the fact:
John Chalmers or to lose the
evidence and subborn perjury 17 years after the fact as with
Dennis Perry in Georgia | Michael Williams |
Congratulations
to the NCB team in San José on your Emmy nomination
We will
be watching for the story in Rolling Stone April 21!
John Stoll
(2)
John
Stoll sues | John
Stoll's release and events leading up to it | Houston
| Gerald Amirault | Wenatchee
| Bakersfield | Saskatoon
| Dateline transcript (Oct,
2004) | Receently witch hunted: Michael
Cardamone
Who
Was Abused?
By Maggie Jones, The New
York Times, September 19, 2004
There are several ways to view
the small white house on Center Street in Bakersfield, Calif.
From one perspective it's just another low-slung home in a working-class
neighborhood, with a front yard, brown carpeting, a TV in the
living room. Now consider it from the standpoint of the Kern
County district attorney's office: 20 years ago, this was a crime
scene of depraved proportions. According to investigators, in
the living room with brown carpeting and a TV, boys between the
ages of 6 and 8 were made to pose for pornographic photos. On
a water bed in the back bedroom, the boys were sodomized by three
men, while a mother had sex with her own son.
But look at the house once
again -- this time, through Ed Sampley's eyes. Twenty years ago
he was one of the boys molested in the house where sex abuse
was part of the weekend fabric. That's what he told Kern County
investigators. That's what he told a judge, a jury and a courtroom
of lawyers. The testimony of Sampley and five other boys was
the prosecution's key evidence in a trial in which four defendants
were convicted, with John Stoll, a 41-year-old carpenter, receiving
the longest sentence of the group: 40 years for 17 counts of
lewd and lascivious conduct.
Now for the first time in 20
years, Sampley is back in the driveway of that small white house.
''It never happened,'' he tells me. He lied about Stoll, an easygoing
divorced father who always insisted the neighborhood kids call
him John rather than Mr. Stoll and let them run in and out of
his house in their bathing suits, eat popcorn on the living-room
floor and watch ''fright night'' videos.
Last January, Sampley and three
other former accusers returned to the courthouse where they had
testified against Stoll. This time they came to say Stoll never
molested them. They are in their late 20's now. They have jobs
in construction, car repair, sales. A couple of them have children
about the same age as they were when they testified. Although
most of the boys drifted apart after the trial, their life stories
echo with similarities. Each of them said he always knew the
truth -- that Stoll had never touched them. Each said that he
felt pressured by the investigators to describe sex acts. A fifth
accuser isn't sure what happened all those years ago but has
no memory of being molested. During the court hearing
to release Stoll, only his son Jed remained adamant that his
father had molested him, though he couldn't remember details
of the abuse: ''I've been through many years of therapy to try
to get over that,'' he told the court.
Maggie Bruck, co-author of
''Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children's
Testimony'' and a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University,
says no long-term psychological studies exist that track groups
of children involved in alleged sex-abuse rings, in part because
of confidentiality issues. But Bruck has studied follow-up interviews
of children involved in cases similar to the notorious McMartin
preschool trial. Some kids continue to believe they were abused.
Bruck suspects it's because their families or therapists have
reinforced the stories of abuse. ''The children say they don't
remember the salient, allegedly terrifying details,'' she told
me. ''But they are sure it happened.''
Then there are other kids --
kids like Sampley who have always known nothing happened and
have spent years tormented by it. Linda Starr, the legal director
of the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University
School of Law, which represented Stoll in his hearing this year,
is a former sex-crimes prosecutor and was surprised to see how
much the events of 20 years ago had affected the children.
''Before I met them, I didn't appreciate that these kids,
who had not been sexually abused, would have experienced trauma
comparable to kids who had been,'' Starr says.
In part, Sampley, now 28 and
a worker for a commercial-sign maker, is haunted by his own role.
''Why couldn't I withstand the pressure?'' he says. ''I didn't
smoke when I was pressured by my friends. But when I was pressured
by the investigators, I broke down. I still search for that moment
I gave in.'' He is also haunted by how the investigation distorted
his trust. Several years ago, he realized that each time his
stepdaughter, then 6, invited friends to the house, he shut himself
in his bedroom; he didn't want to play with strangers' kids or
even be around them. For a year, he also wouldn't give his own
daughter, now 3, a bath. ''I'm afraid of somebody saying something
that isn't true.'' A child or an angry ex-girlfriend might twist
the truth into a lie. A tickle becomes molestation; a hug is
lechery. He knows firsthand that children do lie.
In September 1983, when John
Stoll rented the white three-bedroom house in an east Bakersfield
neighborhood, Eddie Sampley was a sweet, polite second grader
with sun-blond hair and plenty of freckles. His mother kept a
close eye on her only child; Eddie wasn't allowed to bike more
than three houses away without permission and had to check in
every 30 minutes when he was out in the neighborhood. Among his
friends, Eddie was the kid with the cool, chrome-colored bike
who won cycling races and maneuvered the concrete embankments
of the nearby reservoir on his skateboard.
That winter, Eddie met a new
kid in the neighborhood named Jed Stoll. His parents were divorced,
and Jed spent every other weekend at his father's house, six
doors from Eddie's. Jed had a collection of Matchbox cars, cap
guns and a dad who didn't have too many rules.
The house was busy on the weekends
Jed visited. Stoll often picked up Jed's friends, Donnie, 6,
and Allen, 8, whose mother, Margie Grafton, was a friend of Stoll's,
and he drove the pack of boys to the beach in his black Toyota
truck with a camper shell. Or he would bring them back to the
house where they and other neighborhood kids caught frogs, dug
in the irrigation ditches out back or swam in the pool.
One June afternoon, a sheriff's
deputy named Conny Ericsson, along with Velda Murillo, a social
worker with the county's Child Protective Services, came to Eddie's
house to talk to him about a possible neighborhood sex ring.
Ericsson was a recent transfer to the sex-crimes unit and had
no training in sex-abuse investigations. Murillo was the more
experienced one, and several kids say she led many of the interviews.
She was small, with long dark hair and bangs, and might have
been mistaken for a schoolteacher. By many accounts, she was
intense about her work.
That day, Ericsson and Murillo
told Mr. and Mrs. Sampley that they needed to speak to their
son alone. As Karen Sampley tried to listen through a heating
vent in the kitchen, the investigators asked Eddie about John
Stoll. They told him that other boys said Mr. Stoll did something
sexual to Eddie and that Eddie had seen Mr. Stoll do bad things
to other kids, too. ''I kept telling them no, that nothing
happened,'' Sampley remembers. ''I didn't understand what they
were talking about.'' Murillo and Ericsson described sex acts
that embarrassed the 8-year-old boy, and he started crying. ''I
kept telling them, 'No, no,' but it wasn't working,'' he now
says. After what ''seemed like forever,'' Ericsson and Murillo
told him they'd be back to talk to him again. At the Sampleys'
front door, they told Karen that her son denied being molested,
but that they suspected otherwise. ''I asked what information
they could give me,'' Karen says. ''They told me that it might
be a child-porn ring that was linked to the East Coast, or a
satanic cult or a molestation ring. They weren't sure yet.''
A few weeks later, Karen took
her son downtown for another interview. This one was in the sheriff's
office, and Eddie remembers sitting on a metal chair, at a table
too high to rest his elbows. According to the police report,
Ericsson asked Eddie ''what he calls his penis.'' (''I chose
'hot dog,''' he says, ''because it was the least embarrassing.'')
The deputy also asked about the first time he saw ''adults playing
sex games with the kids.''
''They told me that John Stoll
was a bad man and I needed to help put him in prison so he wouldn't
hurt any more children,'' Sampley says. ''They said everything
would be O.K. if I just told them something had happened.'' And
at some point -- Sampley doesn't remember when or exactly why
-- he changed his story. He told them yes, Stoll had done something
very bad to him. And Stoll had done worse things to other boys.
By then, the investigators
were convinced they were on the trail of another sex ring. Kern
County prosecuted the first major child-sex ring in the United
States in 1982, and within two years the investigations of Stoll
and the McMartin teachers in Manhattan Beach, Calif., were under
way. The hysteria began creeping across the country, to Maplewood,
N.J. (Wee Care Day Nursery), to Malden, Mass. (Fells Acres),
and to Great Neck, Long Island, where the documentary ''Capturing
the Friedmans'' takes place.
Sometimes an investigation
began with a legitimate complaint of the abuse of one child,
which then transmogrified into a sex ring. In the Stoll case,
the only defendant with a previous conviction of molestation
was Grant Self, who rented Stoll's pool house briefly. Jed's
mother, Ann Karlen, had, in fact, told the sheriff's department
that Self had inappropriately touched Jed. (Self denies ever
molesting any of the kids.) But Stoll didn't know about Karlen's
charge or Grant Self's criminal record, Stoll says.
Neither a child nor Karlen
had lodged any abuse allegations against Stoll. In fact, a social
worker was the first person to name him as a suspect. In June
1984, two Child Protective Service workers went to talk to Karlen
after Stoll complained about her child-rearing. Karlen had her
own grievances: Stoll's parenting practices were too lax, and
he often had numerous children at the house where Jed had also
told his mother that he was involved in sex play with another
kid. According to county records, one of the social workers asked
Karlen if Stoll might be a child molester. Karlen said she had
never considered it, but ''he's so weird, maybe.'' After talking
to Karlen, the social worker noted, ''I told her he sounded like
he possibly could be molesting children, including Jed.''
When Murillo and another social
worker asked Jed about being abused, he ''had some difficulty
talking about his father,'' according to Murillo's report. But
as she continued the interview, encouraging Jed to talk about
his father by using a puppet, Jed did accuse his dad. Within
a few days, the Sheriff's Department suspected that Grant Self,
Stoll, Stoll's friend Margie Grafton and her boyfriend, Tim Palomo,
were all part of a sex ring.
Murillo and Ericsson removed
Donnie and Allen from their home and placed them in a juvenile
center where Murillo repeatedly questioned them about their mother
and the other adults. A few days later, the investigators interviewed
8-year-old Victor Monge, one of Eddie's best friends. Though
Victor didn't know what happened to the Grafton boys, he also
feared losing his mother. Mrs. Monge was an illegal immigrant
from Mexico, and Victor thought his mother would be deported
if he didn't tell Murillo what he thought she wanted to hear.
So, Victor told her that Stoll molested him.
It was a school day when Eddie
went to court to testify against Stoll in November 1984. It had
been five months since the investigation began, and Eddie was
now a third grader. He remembers the big court seal over the
judge's head and being very embarrassed. But he can't recall
any of his testimony. ''You don't remember the lies,'' he says.
''You remember the truth.''
On the witness stand, Eddie
said that Stoll had told him to ''get on the water bed.'' He
told him to take his clothes off. Stoll touched his ''hot dog.''
He told him to turn over. Eddie didn't want to, so he left the
room. He testified that on another day, he walked by Jed's bedroom
and the door was slightly open. He saw Stoll trying to put his
penis in Allen. Another time, the door was ajar again and he
saw Stoll trying to put his penis in Donnie.
The other boys offered more
extravagant stories. Allen testified that the children had to
stand in a line to have sex with Stoll on his water bed and that
another time, Margie Grafton took pictures of the adults and
kids naked, ''doing sex things.'' And Donnie detailed being sodomized
by Stoll and having oral sex with Grant Self.
Prosecutions of child sex-rings
later led to dozens of studies about interviewing techniques,
many of which suggested that with a little coaxing, children
tell adults what they think the grown-ups want to hear -- especially
if it means they will go home sooner or be rewarded for providing
information. Several years ago two Chicago boys, 7 and 8, were
accused (and later exonerated) of killing 11-year-old Ryan Harris.
In part, the boys were enticed by a McDonald's Happy Meal to
confess.
James Wood, a psychologist
at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies interview techniques
used with children, says investigators should use nonsuggestive
prompts to help kids to narrate their own stories. ''They shouldn't
tell children they have information from other witnesses,'' he
says. Or praise them when they provide information. Or express
disapproval when they don't. Murillo, who retired from the D.A.'s
office a couple of years ago, won't talk about her investigations
in detail, but she did say: ''We never pressured the children.
Those boys were telling the truth when they first testified.''
Yet even if you believe that
someone did molest one or more of the boys, much of the kids'
testimony pushed the bounds of plausibility -- and of anatomy.
Chris Diuri, four feet tall, testified that he had to sodomize
men two feet taller than him. Asked how he did it, he said: ''I
stand on my toes.'' Jed, who was 6 years old and so small he
had to kneel on the chair to reach the microphone at the witness
stand, could not remember how many months are in a year or the
names of all the months. But he was positive that his father
molested him exactly 19 times. One occasion was a Saturday morning
while his friends Donnie, Allen, Victor and Eddie were in the
next room watching TV. Jed testified that he missed 10 cartoons.
When the trial ended in the
winter of 1985 and all four defendants -- Stoll, Self, Grafton
and her boyfriend -- were convicted, a quiet descended on many
of the boys' families. ''I don't remember ever allowing a child
to spend the night after that,'' Karen Sampley says. ''You felt
like you couldn't even speak to a child on the street. We were
scared we might be next.'' Eddie told his parents that Stoll
had never hurt him, but investigators told her that her son was
too embarrassed to tell her the truth. ''I didn't know what to
believe,'' she says.
By the end of the trial, the
Grafton boys went to live with their father outside Bakersfield.
Jed moved with his mother to Pennsylvania. Within a few years,
Victor's family moved to another Bakersfield neighborhood. The
case began receding into history.
But in small ways, some of
the boys tried to keep the story alive -- and to change it. In
the year following the trial, Donnie Grafton told a therapist
that he had lied in court. After the session, the counselor reported
to Donnie's father that his son was ''in denial.'' Donnie and
his brother didn't talk about what had happened during the investigation.
Neither did Donnie and his dad. But as a frustrated and angry
12-year-old, one afternoon Donnie shut his bedroom door and wrote:
Who is the one I see
in the mirror every morning? I get good grades
But still others get the parades Never me! But
still it comes up, Who am I? As I cry! My mother
imprisoned innocently for 7 years Here come the tears.
As [I] cried & lied & put her there She
didn't do it. I was forced to lie. Here I go to
cry, cry, cry. But I lie to myself as the question
Comes again Who am I.
By that time, Eddie had told
his fourth-grade girlfriend that he lied about Stoll. On a camping
trip a few years later, he told his uncle too. ''He wasn't very
helpful,'' Sampley says. ''He just said, 'Well, what are you
going to do about it?'''
Eddie was the only accuser
left in the Center Street neighborhood. When he rode his bike
by, he could still see Stoll's living room where he had watched
''fright night'' videos. There were other reminders too -- like
the school field trips to the courthouse. ''It was like going
to a doctor's office,'' he remembers. ''I had that creepy feeling.
I didn't want to be there.''
Eddie didn't need external
reminders to torment him. He thought about Stoll all the time.
By high school, he couldn't remember what Stoll looked like,
but he often imagined what his life must be like in prison. He
thought about writing him a letter. ''But then I'd think about
it for a while, the idea would pass and I'd do nothing,'' he
says. Still, he kept confessing; he told every girlfriend he
ever had and he told his closest friends. In part, he was revealing
a painful lie. But he was also trying, in some way, to get help.
''People would say we should do something about it,'' he says,
''but no one really knew how to help me.''
The authority figures with
the power to help all seemed suspect to him. He could have gone
to the district attorney's office, but ''they were the ones who
did this to me,'' he says. He could have called Child Protective
Services. But that was where Velda Murillo worked. He couldn't
go to the sheriff's office. Conny Ericsson worked there. What
about Stoll's defense attorney? ''He lost the case,'' Sampley
said. ''How could he lose that case?''
Bakersfield isn't a town that
welcomes challenges to law enforcement. Though it's just two
hours north of Los Angeles, the city feels more like Texas than
California, surrounded by miles of oil and agriculture fields.
Many residents are proud of the small-town conservative flavor.
On its Web site, the Kern County D.A. office highlights having
''the highest per-capita prison-commitment rate of any major
California county,'' and the longtime district attorney, Ed Jagels,
a subject of the book ''Mean Justice,'' by Edward Humes, is considered
one of the toughest prosecutors in the state. (Jagels declined
comment for this article.) ''You have to understand the power
of Ed Jagels,'' says Michael Snedeker, an attorney who helped
overturn 18 convictions of Bakersfield defendants in sex-ring
cases and co-author of ''Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the
Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt'' with the journalist
Debbie Nathan. ''He is more important than the mayor in that
city. He's more feared than J. Edgar Hoover on his best day.''
In three years during the 1980's,
Jagels and his predecessor prosecuted eight sex rings involving
46 defendants. Consider the example of Scott Kniffen, who agreed
to be a character witness for his friends Alvin and Deborah McCuan,
accused of molesting their own children. Within weeks, Kniffen
and his wife, Brenda, were under arrest for supposed involvement
in the same sex ring. They were subsequently convicted. (Their
convictions were reversed 12 years later). Or consider Jeffrey
Modahl. He was a single dad of two daughters who suspected two
relatives had molested his girls. After Modahl asked Velda Murillo
for help, Murillo's suspicions turned to him. He was sentenced
to 48 years in prison for running a family sex ring that included
tying his preadolescent daughters to hooks in a bedroom. (No
evidence of hooks was ever found.) ''Velda said, 'Tell us what
happened and you'll go home,''' remembers Carla Jo Modahl, who
was 9 when she testified against her father and subsequently
tried to commit suicide several times after his conviction. ''I
didn't understand what would happen. I didn't realize it until
everyone was in prison.'' Carla was scared that if she recanted
her testimony, she, too, would be imprisoned. Still, when she
was 12, she told a judge she'd lied on the witness stand. The
judge didn't believe her, and her father remained in prison for
a dozen more years -- until his conviction was finally reversed.
One night in 1999, Ed Sampley
walked into a Mexican restaurant and saw his childhood friend
Victor Monge at the bar. They had lost touch after the trial,
and now, 15 years later, they were both in their early 20's.
Monge had a job selling phones; Sampley had completed a two-year
degree in computer technology and was installing Internet wiring
in schools. As they headed outside to catch up and smoke cigarettes,
Sampley brought up the D.A.'s office. He always blamed them for
what happened to Stoll. That trial was messed up, Sampley said,
wasn't it? And then Sampley told Monge than Stoll had never molested
him. Monge said the same thing.
Until then Sampley's main obsession
about the trial was his own guilt. But now he and Monge were
comparing notes. ''Things started to make sense,'' Sampley says.
They told each other that they had denied any abuse in the beginning.
But investigators kept pushing and pushing, and they finally
said yes. They talked about how it made their families insular
and more protective. For the same reason that Karen Sampley didn't
want children in her house anymore, Victor's mom didn't either.
''We never hugged or showed affection after that,'' Victor says.
That night might have been
a turning point, a moment when two young men head to a payphone,
put a quarter in the slot and dial -- who exactly? They weren't
sure. ''We talked about it,'' Sampley says. ''But we didn't really
come up with anything.''
Meanwhile, Stoll had spent
15 years in prison. He was 56 years old. His son Jed was about
20 by now and had stopped writing to his father eight years earlier.
Stoll's mother, who always believed in her son's innocence, died
while he was in prison. From time to time, Stoll thought about
Eddie and the rest of the kids. ''I was never angry at them,''
he says. ''I was just disappointed that they'd testified.''
The convictions of most other
defendants in Kern County molestation rings were overturned --
including Margie Grafton's and Tim Palomo's -- as appellate judges
issued often harsh rebukes of the county's overzealous prosecutions.
(After completing his sentence, Grant Self was moved to a state
mental hospital, where he remains because the court deemed him
a ''sexually violent predator.'') Stoll's case lacked easy grounds
for appeal and required a significant pro bono investment from
a law firm. Finally, in 2002, Michael Snedeker got the Northern
California Innocence Project interested in the case, and two
N.C.I.P. attorneys, Jill Kent and Linda Starr, sent a private
investigator to Salmon, Idaho, to track down Donald Grafton.
''You're either going to love that I'm here or you're going to
hate it,'' Sheila Klopper, the investigator, told Grafton when
he answered the door. Over seven hours the next day, Grafton
told Klopper his story, and showed her the poem he had written
at age 12.
A second private investigator
had already found Chris Diuri, Victor Monge and Ed Sampley. When
the investigator showed up at the home of Sampley's parents,
Ed was standing in the front yard, six doors away from Stoll's
house. It was as if he'd been waiting all those years.
When Sampley walked into the
courtroom on the first day of Stoll's hearing last January, he
says he wouldn't have recognized Stoll if he wasn't wearing a
brown jailhouse jumpsuit. He expected Stoll to be bigger and
tougher than the man who had lost most of his teeth after years
of prison dental care and who at age 60 was balding and wore
glasses. Sampley took vacation time from his job to attend as
many days of the hearing as possible. Each time he arrived in
the courtroom, he tried to catch Stoll's eye. ''I wanted him
to know I was there.''
With some exceptions, much
of the original cast from two decades ago appeared during the
12-day hearing. Conny Ericsson, now a narcotics detective in
Redding, Calif., denied tape-recording any of the children, which
contradicted the hearing testimony of Diuri, Monge and Sampley.
Donald Grafton drove 17 hours from Idaho to recant his testimony.
His brother, Allen, arrived in court the next day. Articulate
and introspective, Allen may have had the most vexing experience
of the six kids. For most of his life, he has assumed he was
molested by his mother, Stoll and the other adults. And he has
spent years in therapy, including a 10-week Adults Molested as
Children program. But when he learned that his brother and others
were recanting their testimony, he tried to dredge up specific
memories of abuse -- and realized that he didn't have any. When
a prosecutor, Lisa Green, suggested he might have repressed the
memories, Grafton wasn't convinced. ''I remember getting hit
with a board across the back,'' he told Green. ''I remember being
kicked out of the house for days. I have reasonable memories
about certain tragic events in my life.''
Later, Grafton tells me: ''I've
been lied to one way or another. But I know I have to let go
of victim feelings regardless of what happened. There's something
that's missing in my memory. Or maybe not, and that's the big
joke. Maybe I keep looking for something that's not there.''
On April 30, Judge John Kelly
overturned Stoll's conviction. He said the children had been
improperly interviewed, making their testimony unreliable. In
the days before Stoll's release, Sampley went to visit him in
prison. ''Eddie started to apologize,'' Stoll says. ''I said:
'No. Stop right there. You have nothing to be sorry about. Don't
be sorry; be angry at the people who did this to you.'''
Stoll, who now lives in the
San Jose guesthouse of two of his lawyers while he figures out
how to spend the rest of his life, telephones Sampley and some
of the other kids every once in a while. There is something fatherly
in his voice when Stoll talks about the boys -- as if they were
as much victims as he was. ''I worry about them,'' he says. ''It
seems to me they're all struggling in one way or another.''
Though Sampley clearly helped
win Stoll's release by recanting his testimony, it hasn't purged
the past. It hasn't erased his feelings of guilt for telling
investigators what he thought they wanted to hear. It hasn't
quieted his questions about why he did it. And it doesn't end
his unease around strangers' children. ''I'll never coach Little
League,'' he says. Recently, he was at a playground with his
daughter when a kid in the next swing asked Sampley to give him
a push. ''I said no. It just made me uncomfortable.''
Certainly prosecutors aren't
chasing phantom sex rings as they once did, and investigators
are more educated about proper interview techniques, but some
of the investigative tactics and the mind-set from that era still
linger. In England and Israel, sex-abuse investigators routinely
videotape their interviews. In the United States, only a minority
of prosecutors and investigators are required to do so, and the
American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, an organization
of child-protection workers, has never officially supported recording
interviews. Some members have claimed it confuses juries.
''It's shameful -- they should
have taken a stance on it a long time ago,'' says Wood, the University
of Texas psychologist and an Apsac member. ''If you want to know
what really happened, without an audiotape of the interview it's
like trying to diagnose lung cancer without an X-ray.'' If Murillo
and Ericsson had recorded the interviews, life might have turned
out differently for Stoll and his co-defendants, as well as for
his accusers. The McMartin trial ended without convictions after
the jury saw videotapes of therapists' suggestive questioning
of kids.
Still, discredited child-sex
rings like McMartin actually may not be a bogeyman of the past.
Some parents, therapists and child-protection professionals continue
to believe ritual sex abuse took place at McMartin preschool.
''In 10 to 15 years, there will be an attempt to rehabilitate
the ritual abuse scare,'' Wood says. ''You can bet on it.''
On an August night three months
after Stoll's release from prison, Sampley and I stand outside
Stoll's former house. ''I think this is where the pool was,''
he says, pointing to the end of the driveway now covered with
asphalt. As Sampley talks, the owner of the house walks up and
introduces himself. He's a Mexican immigrant who moved in in
the early 90's. He has never heard of John Stoll or the trial,
but he invites us inside for a tour. We walk through the living
room where, according to the D.A.'s version of events, children
were lined up and photographed naked. We go to the back of the
house -- once a den of sex abuse, prosecutors say -- now a studio
apartment that was Stoll's bedroom with custom- built shelves
for Jed's collection of Matchbox cars and where Stoll's water
bed was decorated with the Pac-Man pillowcases and sheets that
Jed loved.
''I don't know,'' Sampley says.
''None of it really looks familiar.'' He says he thinks he remembers
where the TV was, where he watched a ''fright night'' video about
man-eating cockroaches. But Stoll later tells me it was on a
different wall. Sampley remembers some kid showed him a Playboy
magazine in one of the bedrooms. But he isn't sure which kid
or which room. These are just the vague memories of typical childhood
days at a neighborhood house.
From Sampley's perspective,
the inside of the Center Street house is, in fact, just an ordinary
home with brown carpeting and a TV in the living room. As we
leave that evening, Sampley says that it's the outside of the
house that gnaws at him. That's what still triggers his feelings
of disillusionment and of self-recrimination. ''I don't think
it will ever completely go away,'' he says. ''Even now, when
I see the house, it's like a statue.'' It's a monument to deception.
News from the San
Joaquin Valley
BAKERSFIELD, Calif, AP, .June
14, 2004 A man whose child molestation conviction was
overturned after he'd spent nearly 20 years in prison is
considering suing the county. John Stoll was freed last
month. "We haven't decided what direction to take,"
Stoll said of the possibility of bringing a civil
suit against the county.
So far, Kern County has spent
more than $5 million settling lawsuits from defendants whose
child molestation convictions in the 1980s were since overturned
because of botched investigations, improper questioning techniques, and
misconduct on the part of the prosecution.
Until his release, Stoll was
one of the last of the 46 defendants still being held
from a string of 1980s molestation cases. Even though
most of those cases have been reversed, county prosecutors maintain that
the defendants are guilty and won't apologize to those who have
asked.
Freeing the
innocent
by Louis Freedberg, editor,The
San Francisco Chronicle, June 6, 2004
IN A WINDOWLESS ROOM at
Santa Clara University last week, 19 law students participating
in the summer "boot camp" of the Northern California
Innocence Project listened intently to the lunch-time speaker:
a Bakersfield man who spent 19 years in California jails
after being wrongly convicted of unimaginable sex crimes
against children.
On May 6, a judge ordered John
Stoll, now 61, released from jail after serving less than
half his sentence for being a "sexually violent predator."
The judge said Stoll's conviction had been based on the
"unreliable testimony" of child witnesses.
Stoll was swept up in what
is now widely accepted as a prosecutorial system that had
gone off the tracks -- some call it a witch-hunt -- in which
46 people in the Bakersfield area were convicted of sex
crimes against children. Over the years, 22 of their convictions
have been overturned for a variety of reasons.
Stoll's case underscores an
uncomfortable truth: There's no denying that there are people
in our jails who were wrongly accused, and wrongly convicted.
Stoll went into prison with
the strapping build of a carpenter, and a full head of hair.
Today, he is mostly bald. He has seven teeth left. But he has
retained a sense of humor and an astonishing lack of bitterness
about his ordeal. He survived in prison by concealing his
convictions for pedophilia and invented a false but safer
identity as a convicted drug dealer. What catches his attention, and
sometimes reduces him to tears, are the simple things: ice cubes,
salt and the smell of fresh rain on leaves.
The only reason Stoll, who
always insisted on his innocence, is free is because of
the tenacious work of a small band of students and staff at the
Innocence Project, based at private law schools at Santa
Clara University, Golden Gate University in San Francisco
and California Western University in Los Angeles. Law
professor Cookie Ridolfi, one of the project's founders, believes
that, conservatively, 1 percent of the 164,000 inmates in
California prisons -- more than 1,600 of them -- are innocent
of the crimes they have been convicted of. Each week the
project gets as many as 50 requests for help.
"It's like a needle in
a haystack, and we're in the business of trying to find them
and give them relief," she says. But the Innocence
Project's future is in doubt. Because of the state's budget crisis,
last December the project lost the $800,000 in annual state funding
it was receiving. Now the project is limping along on private
contributions.
Trying to free those wrongly
convicted as pedophiles, murderers and rapists is far from
glamorous or popular work. It's definitely not remunerative.
But the only way we can have confidence in our criminal-justice
system is to ensure there are places innocent people can
turn to after they have exhausted their appellate rights.
Without Ridolfi's staff and students to take up their cause,
the doors in California's prison cells holding people like John
Stoll will have slammed shut even tighter.
Louis Freedberg is a Chronicle
editorial writer. E-mail: lfreedberg@sfchronicle.com
Despite
the students' victory in the Stoll case, the project's future
is by no means assured: Its two-year $400,000 state grant is
not being renewed, because of California's budget crunch. (See
erticle below Write to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
State Capitol Building Sacramento, CA 95814 Phone: 916-445-2841
Fax: 916-445-4633 governor@governor.ca.gov
to re-instate the funding for THE
INNOCENSE PROJECT The Chronicle of Higher Education: Students
June 11, 2004 Volume 50, Issue 40, Page A26
Not Guilty After All
A nationwide project uses
law students, and DNA, to help overturn wrongful convictions
By KATHERINE S. MANGAN
Maureen R. Pettibone was 4
years old when John Stoll was convicted of 17 counts of child
molestation. She was 23 when she helped convince a judge that
Mr. Stoll had been locked up for nearly two decades for crimes
he did not commit.
Ms. Pettibone will enter her
second year at Santa Clara University School of Law this fall
with the kind of experience that few lawyers in training can
ever dream of. As a member of the Northern California Innocence
Project, she was part of a team of law students and professors
whose wrongful-conviction case made national headlines this spring.
The program is an offshoot
of the Innocence Project, a national nonprofit legal clinic that
handles many cases in which DNA testing of evidence can conclusively
prove the innocence of some prisoners.
"I tend to think of these
Innocence Projects as God's work," says Myrna S. Raeder,
a professor of law at Southwestern University School of Law,
in Los Angeles, and a former chair of the American Bar Association's
criminal-justice section.
"They're mainly representing
indigent people who have exhausted their resources over the years
and have nowhere else to turn."
The program was founded in
1992 at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
and has since mushroomed into a network of about 30 loosely affiliated
clinics whose petitions have, collectively, freed 144 inmates
on the basis of DNA evidence. While Yeshiva's clinic takes on
only DNA-related cases, others, like those in California, also
handle non-DNA cases. Nationwide, officials with the Innocence
Project estimate that non-DNA cases have accounted for at least
another 150 exonerations. Supervised by a team of lawyers --
paid staff members and pro bono volunteers -- law students handle
each of the cases, getting intensive hands-on training.
Last year law students at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison won freedom for a man who
had been imprisoned for 18 years after being convicted of rape
and assault. Just last month, students at Northwestern University
Law School gained the release of a man sentenced to death for
a 1986 double murder.
In California, Ms. Pettibone
recalls the moment on April 30 when a Kern County Superior Court
judge issued his ruling exonerating Mr. Stoll of all charges.
The decision came after most of the alleged victims, who were
6 to 8 years old at the time of Mr. Stoll's 1985 conviction,
testified as adults that investigators had pressured them to
make up stories about the supposed abuse.
The law students in the courtroom
"were completely overwhelmed" by their victory, Ms.
Pettibone says, "but we couldn't look at John because we
were not allowed to make eye contact with him." (A sign
posted outside the courtroom admonished everyone but lawyers
to avoid any contact with the defendant.) "We were all bawling
quietly because we didn't want to get thrown out."
The ruling was the culmination
of nearly two years of painstaking work by students and professors
from both Santa Clara and the California Innocence Project, which
is based at the California Western School of Law, in San Diego.
The students helped track down Mr. Stoll's alleged victims and
determine how they had been manipulated into testifying about
abuse they now said never happened.
The students also helped lawyers
assemble their arguments and prepare for cross-examinations of
witnesses. And they pored over thousands of pages of legal documents,
searching for clues to their client's innocence.
Ms. Pettibone started working
with the Innocence Project the summer after her junior year,
first as a volunteer and then as a paid researcher. A biology
major, she became intrigued by the use of DNA evidence to free
wrongly convicted prisoners.
"I've always theoretically
liked public-interest work, but this put a personal face on it,"
she says. "It wasn't just some idealistic pursuit."
A Freed Man
Mr. Stoll says he would still
be languishing in prison were it not for the law students' efforts.
"It's phenomenal what
they did for me," he told The Chronicle. "They reached
into the state trash can and pulled me right out."
Mr. Stoll was released on May
4, his 61st birthday. He was one of 30 people convicted in the
mid-1980s in what police and prosecutors described at the time
as a ring of child molesters and pornographers living in Bakersfield,
Calif. Critics called the arrests a witch hunt by overzealous
law-enforcement officials. More than half of the convictions
have been reversed, but Mr. Stoll served the longest sentence
of any of them. An attorney who represented some of the other
Bakersfield defendants contacted the Innocence Project because
he didn't have time to take on the Stoll case.
Doctors never examined the
children in Mr. Stoll's case, which was based almost entirely
on the children's testimonies. Current prosecutors maintain that
Mr. Stoll is, in fact, guilty, but they do not plan retry him.
After stepping out of prison
into the glare of the news-media spotlight, Mr. Stoll, now gray
and balding, welcomed the attention that students have continued
to lavish on him. This spring students and staff members from
the Innocence Project took him on a shopping spree at a local
mall, where they critiqued his new outfits as he tried on khakis
and shirts at the Gap and Banana Republic. They rounded out his
wardrobe with a Santa Clara University T-shirt and a new pair
of glasses.
Mr. Stoll is living temporarily
at the home of Linda Starr, legal director of the Northern California
Innocence Project, and uses a day planner to keep up with his
regular lunches and outings with law students.
"We've kind of adopted
him," says Elizabeth Voorhees, who graduated from Santa
Clara's law school last year. "How traumatic to have nothing
and suddenly be dropped in the 21st century."
The case changed students'
lives as well as Mr. Stoll's.
"This was a life-altering
experience for these students that provided a glimpse of the
best and the worst of our criminal-justice system," Ms.
Starr says. "It was a nice feeling being in the trenches
together, trying to make this happen. There was an edge of tremendous
anxiety, but also great excitement."
Thousands of miles away, law
students at Yeshiva's Cardozo law school have also been working
around the clock to free prisoners. Jacqueline L. Cadman, 24,
just finished her second year there and is spending the summer
working on death-penalty appeals in Texas.
She worked on the case of a
man exonerated in February after serving more than six years
in a Boston prison. Stephan Cowans had been convicted of a series
of charges, including armed robbery and shooting a police officer.
Ripping Through All the Lies
Yet the DNA evidence supported
the defense's contention that he had been wrongly convicted.
In addition, a new analysis of the fingerprint that had sent
Mr. Cowans to prison showed that it was not his.
"Working with the Innocence
Project has, without a doubt, changed my life," Ms. Cadman
says. "It showed me how important it is that the criminal-justice
system be fair and accurate. I've seen what can happen when things
go wrong."
The experience strengthened
her commitment to become a criminal-defense lawyer. Her only
concern is that the rest of her career may be anticlimactic.
"I don't know how anything is going to top the experience
of getting an innocent man out of jail," she says.
Ms. Voorhees could not agree
more, even though she was reluctant to get involved in a child-molestation
case at first. As an adolescent, she says, she had been repeatedly
molested by a family member. Ms. Voorhees, who is now 36, had
reported the abuse to authorities, she says, "but no one
believed me."
Working on Mr. Stoll's case
would require a potentially troubling role reversal: She would
now be the adult insisting that the alleged victims were not
telling the truth.
As she began investigating
the techniques that investigators had used to interview the children,
however, she became convinced that it was not only possible,
but likely, that the children had fabricated their stories about
Mr. Stoll.
"At first it was an academic
exercise, but the more I researched the case, the more I realized
there was no way he could have done the things he was accused
of," Ms. Voorhees says. "After I met with him, he became
a person and not a case. It became important to get him out."
After studying the available
research into what is known as "false-memory implantation,"
she concluded that investigators, by badgering the children and
describing acts of abuse, had convinced them that they had indeed
been molested.
In his ruling, Judge John Kelly
said the interviewing methods "resulted in unreliable testimony
from child witnesses."
Ms. Voorhees was ecstatic.
"It was the investigative-techniques portion that overturned
the conviction," she says. "My first reaction was,
'Oh, my God -- it worked!' I'm not a lawyer yet, and I don't
expect that the things I write and submit to the court will have
that kind of impact."
Neither did students at California
Western. "It took two law-school projects, seven or eight
lawyers, a dozen law students, and an investigator to rip through
all of the lies and get a good result," says Justin Brooks,
a law professor, who directs the Innocence Project there.
Broad Perspective
In a typical year, about 50
students apply to work in the California Western clinic, and
12 are selected. Each applicant is given a test to demonstrate
that he or she has the tenacity and resourcefulness for the job.
Last year one student was tested
by being given a photograph of a house on the Pacific coast and
told that a murder had occurred there. The student's job was
to track down the details of the murder. She eventually identified
a 20-year-old Malibu, Calif., case by searching the Internet
for photos that matched the one she had and then driving along
the California coast for hours, looking for the house.
"It isn't just another
law class," Mr. Brooks says. "We have to live with
these students for a year, and if they don't do the work, someone
might not get out of prison."
The program
is also popular at Santa Clara.
"You're seeing the case
from beginning to end, from the arrest through post-conviction,"
says Kathleen Ridolfi, a law professor, who heads the Northern
California Innocence Project. "It provides students with
a very broad perspective on how the system works and allows them
to step back and see the systemic problems that can lead to wrongful
convictions."
Despite the students' victory
in the Stoll case, the project's future is by no means assured:
Its two-year $400,000 state grant is not being renewed, because
of California's budget crunch.
Ms. Ridolfi is trying to come
up with novel ways to raise awareness -- and money -- for the
center. Recently she teamed up with a dance professor at Santa
Clara to create "Barred From Life," a multimedia dance
production about the lives of wrongly convicted prisoners. Donations
were accepted at the door.
Meanwhile, the clinic's students
have moved on to other cases of prisoners who insist they were
wrongly convicted. But the lawyers-to-be have not forgotten about
the former prisoners whose cases already have consumed so much
of their energy.
Jonathon D. Nicol, a Santa
Clara law student who worked on the case, says he recently received
a telephone call from Mr. Stoll. "I was in the middle of
finals," says Mr. Nicol, "and he called me and said,
'Hey, man, let's go for a walk,' We walked through the campus
and through the rose garden in Santa Clara. He was literally
stopping and smelling the roses. He hadn't been able to do that
in 20 years."
Working on Mr. Stoll's case,
Mr. Nicol says, "helped me understand that, on the one hand,
the system can screw up. But on the other hand, if we do the
right research and work hard enough, we have the power to fix
things."
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