While you are off the deep end in this particular case, I couldn't agree more in general. Prosecutorial abuse is a very serious threat to liberty in this county. Just look at the lives ruined during the day care provider witch hunts of a few years back. Janet Reno's railroading of the Florida police officer is one of the most shocking travesties of justice in the past decade.
Here is the story from WSJ:
The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- February 20, 1998
Review & Outlook Reno Overturned
Over the past year this page has reported on the legal pursuit and trials of Miami police officer Grant Snowden, sentenced in 1986 to five life terms on charges that he had committed sexual crimes against small children. The work back then of the office of Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno, the case against Mr. Snowden stands as an unforgettable exemplar of the notions of law and justice that govern child abuse prosecutors intent on winning a conviction at any cost. Fortunately the work of such prosecutors can, in time, be undone--and this is what the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has now done.
In a unanimous ruling handed down late Wednesday, Judges J.L. Edmondson, Harry Wellford and Thomas A. Clark have reversed Grant Snowden's conviction. A conviction, like so many in the delirium of child sex abuse cases mounted in the 1980s, won with the help of testimony from alleged experts in child sex abuse, with the presentation of what was alleged to be medical evidence of abuse, and child witnesses subjected to endless hours of interrogation designed to extract accusations of molestation.
The judges' decision, which ought to hearten everyone concerned for the health and sanity of the justice system, cannot of course undo the nearly 12 years Grant Snowden has spent locked up, the endless darkness of his several life terms looming before him--the fruit of a successful prosecution based entirely on allegations of crimes for which there was no evidence. The judges note, pointedly, that the case against Mr. Snowden was based almost entirely on stories told by three young child witnesses--the oldest of whom was six years old, testifying about abuse that had supposedly occurred two years earlier. When he was four, that is. Further, the judges note in their decision, "The only physical evidence that a child might have been abused by anyone was that one of the children had been treated for an ailment which can be transmitted sexually, but is also transmitted by other means."
Like so many prosecutions of its kind, the case brought against Officer Snowden depended heavily on the testimony of the state's experts--experts who could, for instance, persuade juries that children who maintained under questioning that they had not been molested were not telling the truth. And that indeed, the more they maintained they had not been molested, the more certain it was that they had been abused.
According to these experts, a child was worthy of belief only when he agreed he had been molested. Otherwise the child was described, as a prosecution expert in the case against the Amiraults did, as "not ready to disclose." In these prosecutions, experts were brought forth to persuade juries that the impossible was possible: that, for example, a four-year-old could be penetrated anally with a butcher knife without leaving signs of injury, as one medical expert for the prosecution testified at the trial of the Amiraults.
The function of such expert witnesses, in sum, is to convince juries to disbelieve the evidence of their common sense experience, won over a lifetime. We are speaking here of junk science--employed in all manner of cases, not least in these now notorious child abuse prosecutions.
The case that Florida State Attorney Reno's office brought against Grant Snowden was no exception. Focusing on the testimony of expert prosecution witness Dr. Simon Miranda--who told the jury that "99.5%" of children making accusations of abuse were telling the truth, the judges stated that they need go no further than this. Here was a case, they noted, in which an expert had come to vouch that other witnesses--the children--were telling the truth, a usurpation of the jury's function. Given "the circumstances of the trial underlying this case," the judges wrote, and "considering the lack of other evidence of guilt," they came to their decision granting Mr. Snowden's petition for relief, and ordering his release, "unless the state affords him a speedy new trial."
Attorney Robert Rosenthal, who argued Mr. Snowden's brief, says that this outcome was inevitable--the judges could have come to no other conclusion. Inevitable, perhaps, but it remains something of a miracle, certainly to Grant Snowden, whose years of legal struggle up to now have met a deaf ear in the lower courts. His struggles, of course, are far from over. The prosecutors will surely appeal. Still, there is for the first time since the beginning of the destruction of the life and career of police officer Grant Snowden, a chance for freedom and the truth.
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