Abusive Justice

ON January 14, two hundred people gathered in Salem, Massachusetts, to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the Day of Contrition, a day of fasting and remorse proclaimed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the public hysteria and judicial misconduct that had led to “great hardship brought upon innocent persons” in what have come to be known as the Salem witch trials. Among those present were many of the chief participants in the struggle against their modern variant, the child-sex-abuse persecutions of the 1980s and 1990s, most of which have included charges of Satanic ritual.

In addition to the pioneering researchers on the suggestibility of children and a handful of journalists who had kept their heads while their colleagues wallowed in sensation, there were the victims themselves. Kelly Michaels was there, the young would-be actress who served 5 years of a 47-year sentence on patently ridiculous charges of sexually molesting virtually all the 3- to 5-year-olds at the Wee Care Day Nursery unnoticed by any of her fellow workers. A prize moment from the trial: a child describes being forced to push a sword into Miss Michaels’s rectum and being politely told “thank you” when he pulls it out. Also present were Peggy Ann and Ray Buckey, accused in the McMartin case, the costliest criminal trial in U.S. history; Pastor Roberson and his wife, who supposedly turned their Baptist church in Wenatchee, Washington, into a site for mass sex orgies; Brenda and Scott Kniffen, who were each sentenced to 240 years in prison (and served 14 before their sentences were overturned) for participating in a nonexistent sex ring in Bakersfield, California; Violet and Cheryl Amirault, the mother and daughter who ran the Fells Acre nursery in Massachusetts, free after 7 years in prison, their sentences tossed out by an appeals-court judge.

About the Author

Rael Jean Isaac

Rael Jean Isaac is a co-author, with Virginia Armat, of Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill.

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Department of Justice

ON January 14, two hundred people gathered in Salem, Massachusetts, to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the Day of Contrition, a day of fasting and remorse proclaimed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the public hysteria and judicial misconduct that had led to “great hardship brought upon innocent persons” in what have come to be known as the Salem witch trials. Among those present were many of the chief participants in the struggle against their modern variant, the child-sex-abuse persecutions of the 1980s and 1990s, most of which have included charges of Satanic ritual.

In addition to the pioneering researchers on the suggestibility of children and a handful of journalists who had kept their heads while their colleagues wallowed in sensation, there were the victims themselves. Kelly Michaels was there, the young would-be actress who served 5 years of a 47-year sentence on patently ridiculous charges of sexually molesting virtually all the 3- to 5-year-olds at the Wee Care Day Nursery unnoticed by any of her fellow workers. A prize moment from the trial: a child describes being forced to push a sword into Miss Michaels’s rectum and being politely told “thank you” when he pulls it out. Also present were Peggy Ann and Ray Buckey, accused in the McMartin case, the costliest criminal trial in U.S. history; Pastor Roberson and his wife, who supposedly turned their Baptist church in Wenatchee, Washington, into a site for mass sex orgies; Brenda and Scott Kniffen, who were each sentenced to 240 years in prison (and served 14 before their sentences were overturned) for participating in a nonexistent sex ring in Bakersfield, California; Violet and Cheryl Amirault, the mother and daughter who ran the Fells Acre nursery in Massachusetts, free after 7 years in prison, their sentences tossed out by an appeals-court judge.