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.