Day: July 27, 2001

Massachusetts Parole Board Acts Quickly on Amirault Parole Request

At the beginning of July the Massachusetts state Parole Board gave Gerald Amirault new hope that his long nightmare might be finally coming to a close, after it recommended commuting his sentence.

Amirault was a victim of the 1980s hysteria that claimed Satanic cults were responsible for widespread sexual abuse of children. Amirault was convicted in 1986 of molesting and raping eight children at the Fells Acre Day Care Center, which his family owned.

About 40 children from the day care center claimed they had been grossly sexually abused — including having been sexually penetrated with knives. The problem was that there was no corroborating physical evidence for these claims — none of the children who claimed to be violated with knives, for example, ever showed any sort of injury.

The children were subjected to grossly inadequate interrogations, including being bribed with candy and other gifts to describe the alleged sexual encounters. The transcript of the interviews shows that whenever a child would try to say that some allegation didn’t happen or that one of the other children was lying, the interviewers would use leading questions to lead the children back to asserting the truth of the allegations.

What happened in the Amirault case was a tragic miscarriage of justice for which Gerald Amirault has already wasted 15 years of his life in jail. The governor should act quickly to set this wrong right again.

Source:

Massachusetts parole board votes to free convicted child molester. Leslie Miller, Associated Press, July 6, 2001.

New York Man’s Attack on Wife Costs Him Fortune

The legal fight in the wake of Aftab Islam’s savage 1999 assault on his wife recently produced yet another landmark legal ruling when the New York State Supreme Court ruled that his assault on his wife was so shocking that Islam forfeited his entire $17 million fortune as part of a court-ordered divorce settlement.

In April 1999, Aftab’s wife, Havell, told him that she wanted a divorce. On April 22, 1999, while Havell slept, he violently attacked her in front of the couple’s children with a pair of dumbbells. As New York Supreme Court Justice Jacqueline Silbermann described the attack,

The husband violently attack his wife with a barbell, causing her teeth and portions of her jaw to fly across the room and bloodying her until her features were unrecognizable. In addition, he continued his murderous assault in front of three of his young children. … as a result of this crime, the wife suffered unspeakable pain, humiliation and fear, and continues to suffer to this day, as do the children.

Havell required 26 separate surgeries to repair the damage from the assault. Aftab was sentenced to eight years in jail after he plead guilty to assault charges.

Aftab’s prosecution created the first controversial divorce-related note. While the court essentially gave the couple’s entire fortune to Havell, it did set aside $400,000 (later reduced to $215,000) for Aftab to pay for defense lawyers. Some feminist groups perceived that as requiring the victim to pay for her attacker’s defense lawyers.

Meanwhile, Aftab’s lawyers contended that since New York law typically calls for a 50-50 split of assets in long-term marriages, the awarding of all but a small percentage of the family fortune to Havell was an abuse of discretion. The New York Supreme Court found otherwise, saying that the attack was so “shocking and egregious” that the lower court had been justified in awarding the bulk of the communal property to Havell.

Source:

Divorce attack has $8M price tag. Dareh Gregorian, New York Post, July 26, 2001.

Wife Must Pay for Batterer’s Criminal Defense. Rita Henley Jensen, Women’s ENews, September 4, 2000.

N.Y.C. banker pleads guilty to attacking wife. India Abroad, August 18, 2000.

When a Mother Kills

Donna Laframboise wrote a perceptive article about the way violence by women is perceived differently than violence by men.

Laframboise notes that last summer there were two prominent Canadian domestic violence cases. In one instance a man from Pickering, Ontario, murdered his estranged wife and then killed himself, while in the otehr a man from Kitchener, Ontario killed his four children and his wife before killing himself.

This year, however, the Andrea Yates case is of course occupying the media, as is a Toronto case where police recently charged a woman with killing here two kids and then attempting to kill herself. But the public reaction is a bit different from the reaction to the male killers. According to Laframboise,

Radio station phone lines aren’t lighting up with people condemning anti-domestic-violence programs as inadequate. Governments, police and the courts aren’t being accused of doing too little to protect the vulnerable. No one is asking how many more innocent children have to die before these offences receive proper attention. The term “child abuse” is also noticeably absent from the discussion. We aren’t being inundated with statistics telling us how many children are killed by their parents — particularly mothers — each year.

Laframboise thinks the reason is that people are so used to hearing about violence against women that they immediately “slot” stories where women are the victims into that category, while the corresponding lack of publicity about violence where women are the perpetrators makes people see it as the exception to the rule (which perhaps explains why commentators often say they cannot imagine why a woman would kill her children, but rarely do such questions arrise when fathers kill their offspring).

Source:

Domestic violence isn’t a gender issue. Donna Laframboise, National Post, July 18, 2001.