Mean Justice: A Town's Terror, A Prosecutor's Power, A Betrayal of Innocence

The war on crime has gone terribly wrong in America's heartland –
and the unintended casualty of war is innocence.

Mean Justice: A Town's Terror, A Prosecutor's Power, A Betrayal of Innocence is a stunning portrait of a California community so obsessed with making itself safe from crime that it has created one of the toughest justice systems in the country – and, in the process, sent a shocking number of innocent men and women to prison for crimes they did not commit.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes weaves this story of wrongful conviction and justice miscarried around the plight of retired high-school principal Patrick O. Dunn, a law-and-order conservative who never doubted the methods used in making the streets of his beloved Bakersfield, California, safe. But after his wife disappeared and he became the prime suspect in her murder -- motivated, it was said, by the millions she inherited from a previous marriage – Dunn found himself in a murky law-enforcement Wonderland in which the presumption of innocence seemed a myth and the authorities hid crucial evidence and testimony, thereby ensuring his conviction. Humes' investigation of Dunn's case has revealed for the first time the errors and misconduct that put an otherwise law-abiding man behind bars for life.

If Mean Justice stopped with Dunn's shocking case of justice turned on its head, the story would be more riveting than many best-selling thrillers, but Humes puts Dunn's plight in frightening perspective: Misconduct by police and prosecutors, biased and incompetent investigations, and politicized prosecutions have led to the wrongful prosecution of ninety other men and women in this oil-and-farm boom town just two hours north of Los Angeles. Many have served long years in prison before their convictions were finally overturned and their names cleared.

Even more chilling than this portrait of a community in which innocence is no defense is Humes' searing revelation that Bakersfield is no aberration. Rather, it simply lies at the leading edge of a wave now engulfing the nation. Humes' investigation of wrongful convictions and government misconduct nationwide convincingly and dramatically demonstrates how the public's fear of crime – and prosecutors' relentless campaign to capitalize on that fear by increasing their powers at the expense of judges, juries and civil liberties – has made conviction of the innocent an everyday occurrence in America. Prosecutors today – from Main Street to Wall Street to Washington D.C. – are the most powerful yet least accountable figures in public life. And that power has grown exponentially since September 11, 2001, making the story of Mean Justice all the more powerful and instructive.

Our country's crime rates are lower today than they've been in decades – but, Mean Justice asks, at what cost?

 

 

The reader is simply swept along.

— San Francisco Chronicle

So thorough... So compelling... An important book.

— Chicago Tribune

Fascinating reading... Mean Justice unfolds like a good mystery, with gripping detail, surprising, not to say extraordinary revelation, superb background, a lucid style and solid, commanding conclusions.

— Rocky Mountain News

This story is told like a movie... Humes' nonfiction account reads like many of the courtroom novels so popular now ­ except Pat Dunn is real, a victim and in prison.

— New York Daily News

A wonderfully reported and written indictment of America's law-and-order mentality that in some places has gone berserk.

— San Diego Union-Tribune

Grippingly written, compellingly told, Mean Justice makes other tales on the miscarriage of justice look like pleasant little fairy tales. An eye-popping tale of justice miscarried that will shock anyone who believes our criminal justice system still works just fine.

— Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Mean Justice is a disturbing and sometimes startling  investigation  of how the rights of innocent citizens are trampled when a town,  and its prosecutors and sheriffs, are obsessed with obtaining  convictions at any price. Humes has woven a fascinating story - backed by meticulous research - that will make your blood boil. Mean Justice serves as a cautionary tale that reveals the human and personal costs our country sometimes pays for its zealous “war on crime”.

— Gerald Posner, Case Closed & Killing the Dream

This is the same seamless, honest and also lyrical writing that earned Humes a Pulitzer Prize.

— Los Angeles Times

It sounds like something out of a movie of the week: Pat Dunn's wife, Sandy, vanishes during an early-morning walk. Police soon zero in on Pat himself, and eventually he is tried for the murder of his wife -- based only on suspicious, unsubstantiated "eyewitness" testimony. A hardworking private eye finds herself battling not just time, but an entire corrupt legal system, to keep Dunn out of jail. But this is no TV-movie, just as it is not a typical man-tried-for-a-crime-he-probably-didn't-commit story. Bakersfield, in Kern County, California, where Pat Dunn was convicted of killing his wife (the book ends as he begins his sixth year in prison), has a history of convicting innocent people, of police and political corruption, of miscarriages of justice so astonishing that readers might be inclined not to believe it, if Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, didn't document everything so carefully. This isn't merely the story of a man railroaded into jail; it's the story of a legal system that willfully subverts, mangles, and ignores the rights of citizens. It's a truly terrifying story, as scary as any work of fiction more so, because everything here actually happened.

— Booklist, Starred Review, February 1999

Among those of us who write about crime for a living, the name Edward Humes commands instant respect. Humes assiduously avoids the easy route, which is to sensationalize, embroider and embellish in an attempt to play to the cheap seats and the mass market. Whether his conclusions disturb or offend you, you will find honesty, conviction and journalistic integrity on every page, as well as skilled storytelling and graceful writing. I rate this book with MISSISSIPPI MUD, also by Humes, as two of the best examples of accurate and incisive crime journalism in recent years.

— Jack Olsen,  author of Doc, Hastened to the Grave, Salt of the Earth

 

From Mean Justice: Prologue, Beginnings and Endings

July 1, 1992

He postponed making calling the sheriff for hours, seizing on any interruption that would let him to avoid the moment he dreaded most. He paced. He drank beer. He called his son for advice. He drank more beer. He drove past the dusty corners of East Bakersfield, staring at pedestrians as they braved the glare and spongy asphalt of summer. He returned home and tidied the house, startled by every unexpected creak or rustle. And when a prospective tenant for the shopping plaza he and his wife owned stopped by unexpectedly to discuss plans for a new pizza parlor, he welcomed the man into his home, spoke at length on the virtues of his College Center strip mall, and then even drove the visitor out to squint approvingly at his other properties in the area. Burned a good ninety minutes that way.

 He just did not behave like a man worried about his missing wife, the prosecutor would later say. No way. He took that man out to the mall, and he acted like he hadn't a care in the world. He never once mentioned his wife. Not once.

Finally, late in the afternoon, he found himself alone again in the silent, empty house, out of excuses, out of hope. He sighed and picked up the phone, a pleasant, beefy man in his late fifties with blondish gray hair and pale blue eyes that puffed and drooped like a hound dog's. The hands holding the phone were rough and chapped, though he had given up physical labor years ago.

“Sheriff's Department,” a woman’s voice answered on the third ring. “How can I help you?”

“Hi, Sheriff's Department,” he answered, his tone forced and bright. Though he was Californian born and raised, he spoke in the flat midwestern accent of his Oklahoma forebears, a deep, rumbling voice that slipped often and easily into a nervous chuckle. “Who am I speaking with? This is Pat Dunn.”

“Valley,” the dispatcher said.

“Valley? Like in San Joaquin?”

“Yeah,” the woman answered warily.

“Oh, that's a neat name.”

“Thank you,” the dispatcher said, laughing obligingly.

*    *    *

Listen to the tape of that call, the prosecutor would say. He's laughing, joking. Do you laugh and joke because the woman you supposedly love has disappeared? Or because you think you just got away with murder?

*    *    *

The dispatcher's name was Valentina Braddick, though she preferred Valley. Each day, she took dozens of calls from angry people, sad people, panicked, confused and distraught people. Pleasantries, much less compliments, were in short supply; Pat had immediately gotten on her good side. “Okay, Pat,” Valley Braddick said. “What can I do for you?"

He took a deep breath, sounding unsure, groping for words. “Well, my wife went walking yesterday afternoon or evening, and, uh, she's fifty-six years old and, uh, she took the big black dog with her. And she didn't come home."

“Mmm-hmm,” Valley murmured. It was one of several small sounds she habitually made, her way of prodding callers along without actually interrupting them.

The caller cleared his throat and continued. He and his wife normally went to bed early in the evening, he explained, often by seven o'clock. And most times Sandy got up by three in the morning to go walking. She'd bring one or two of their dogs along. Been doing it for years now, always at three or four in the morning, before the desert heat could blast the city into submission. She insisted it was the safest time to walk, even though she plowed through some of Bakersfield's worst neighborhoods.

But last night, he had awakened with a start a little before ten to find Sandy and their big black Labrador gone — five, six hours before her usual walking time. He said he looked around the house, growing more and more uneasy at her absence. He and Sandy were creatures of habit, he said, and he knew this wasn't right; she would never go walking at this hour. So he decided to drive her usual route. He searched all over east Bakersfield until midnight — and found no sign of his wife anywhere. When he got back home, though, he found the Labrador in the yard where he belonged and Sandy's keys on the kitchen counter. He called out, he searched the house, but it was silent and dark: No Sandy, no note, no anything. He said he had been alternately waiting and searching their part of town ever since. Finally, though, he convinced himself he had to call the sheriff's department for help.

*    *    *

He waited eighteen hours to report his wife missing. Eighteen hours. Is that what a husband who fears for his wife's safety would do? Is that what you'd do?

*    *    *

“She took some cash and, uh, she's gone,” he finished. “I don't know where she is.”

So, this was a routine missing person's report, Valley thought to herself. Nothing she hadn't heard a hundred times before. Husbands and wives took off all the time without a word to their spouses. Nothing the sheriff's department could do -- or would do -- about it, unless there was something unusual about the case, some suggestion of endangerment or foul play.

“Okay,” she said, another prod for the caller to continue.

“It's been less than twenty-four hours, but I'm -- I'm worried,” he said. Then he switched gears and volunteered something else. “Her mother died of Alzheimer's disease."

This got Valley's attention. A report that someone's wife grabbed cash and took a powder was not news at the sheriff's department. A missing woman with mental problems was an entirely different matter. She asked, “Did your wife have Alzheimer's Disease?” Although it did not seem to strike Valley as unusual at the time, his answer, like so many other parts of this conversation, would later seem ambiguous and odd to those scrutinizing his every word and action. He said, “Well I don't know that. I'm not a doctor. I just know she forgets things.” He said the problem was infrequent, slipping in and out of sight, and he gave one example: How his wife might feed the dogs three times in a single evening, forgetting she had done so each time.

“Yeah, she does have memory problems,” the dispatcher agreed.

*    *    *

The people who knew her best never saw any evidence of a failing memory in Alexandra Dunn. Only the defendant claimed she had Alzheimer's Disease. And I submit to you that's nothing more than his cover story.

*    *    *

As they talked, the dispatcher occasionally had to place him on hold to attend to other calls and he was twice disconnected, forcing him to call back but giving him ample opportunity to gripe and chuckle about modern technology. Finally, Valley told him the sheriff's department would indeed log a formal missing persons report on Sandy. Because of the memory problems he described, Sandy would be listed as a “dependent adult,” which meant that, if the police found her, they would pick her up whether she wanted to come home or not. Valley then asked for Sandy's description — her looks, her clothing, her vital statistics. She also asked for the name of Sandy's dentist. Valley did not explain the need for this particular bit of information, so as not to distress her caller. She knew what he did not, that dental records could be used to identify the missing — but only when they turn up dead.

Later, when she asked for his full name, he sounded relieved not to be talking about his wife and he answered, “Patrick O. Dunn, 'O' for Outstanding.” It was said in a self-deprecating, sarcastic way, and he and Valley laughed. Others, though, would not be amused. They would call his humor unseemly, as they would his response to the dispatcher's next query about his race. He joked: “How 'bout old and fat?”

*    *    *

There's no other way to say it. He was flirting. It's right there on the tape. It simply is not the voice of a man desperate to find his wife.

*    *    *

Valley entered the information into the Kern County Sheriff's computer system, then told her caller to get a pencil and paper and to write down the case number, KC92-14851, so he could call back and have it canceled should his wife return home.

“I got it,” he said. His voice, for the first time in their conversation, sounded weary and defeated.

After some words of encouragement and a suggestion that he check the hospitals and the jails in case Sandy had an accident or got arrested, Valley said good-bye and went on to her next call. He hung up and stared at the telephone for a long time, as if waiting to see what would happen next. Time passed -- minutes, hours, he couldn't be sure anymore. The ice in his tall glass of whiskey made small cracking sounds as it slowly melted. Outside, the relentless desert sun of Bakersfield's summer shriveled the lawn and made the air shimmer outside his kitchen window, but the man who reported his wife missing that day would later remember feeling colder than he had ever felt in his life.

*    *    *

When he made that call, I assure you of one thing: Alexandra Dunn was already dead. And he knew it. Because he killed her.

*    *    *

Eight months later: March 24, 1993

The lawyer wept as he drove south on Highway 99, great heaving sobs that left the wheel unsteady in his hands. He struggled to keep his charcoal Mercedes between the lines and on the asphalt, but the tears occasionally blinded him. Mercifully, the highway was ruler straight here, not a curve for miles, the rows of crops and irrigation pipes flashing by in a seventy-mile-an-hour blur. The Kern County Courthouse parking lot was twenty-five miles behind him now, the low sprawl of Bakersfield just a small blur in the rear-view mirror, and still he couldn't stop crying. The jury's verdict kept drowning out everything else in his head, a vicious chant, a sucker punch.

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

The lawyer tugged on his tie, blinking hard. The black leather interior of the car was littered with papers, transcripts, yellow legal pads. On top were the notes he had scrawled for his closing argument, mocking him now. As he had delivered those words, he had told himself the stony looks and the crossed arms in the jury box meant nothing — that's how sure he had been of this one. “Please do the right thing,” he had said just before sitting down at the defense table for the last time, putting it in their twelve pairs of hands. “This guy's not guilty. Do the right thing.” He had harbored no doubts they would heed his plea. The case was such a winner, he and his partner and one of their investigators literally had the champagne on ice. He had never done that before. Never. Nor had he ever said to a client, “Don't worry. There's no way they'll convict.” Until this case.

And no matter what else happened in a case, he never, ever told himself that a client accused of murder was innocent. Not guilty, yes. Reasonable doubt, yes. In all the many other cases he had tried, he had always talked the good lawyer talk, even to himself, focusing on the paucity of the evidence, the holes in the testimony — the stuff of doubt and acquittal. Otherwise, you couldn't do the job, it would drive you crazy. Every good defense lawyer knows it. Only this time, in Bakersfield, far from his home turf and his comfortable practice and the judges he knew by first name, he had dared to say it — and, more to the point, to believe it ’ “My client is an innocent man. I know it. He is being framed for a murder he did not commit.” After twenty-six years in the courtroom, with dozens of capital cases under his belt, he had never before allowed himself the luxury to believe, wholeheartedly, in a client's absolute innocence. He had always considered it irrelevant. Until now.

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

Laura Lawhon had watched the lawyer stagger to his car and drive off, shaking her head, feeling just as devastated as he did, but willing herself to stay strong, to look the gloating cops and jurors in the eye who had gathered together like conspirators after the trial. The defense lawyer could drive off and lick his wounds; Laura, the private investigator, had to stay on and continue the case, to try and turn things around, to hunt down some forgotten clue that might pry the case back open and offer another chance to prove the client innocent. The odds of this were not good.

It wasn't really the lawyer's fault, Laura knew, yet she couldn't help feeling something had been missed, some words left unuttered, some proof left unoffered — some path she, as an investigator, had not taken. They had been given only three months to prepare, an out-of-town defense team new to Kern County and its own way of doing things, but they had taken a crash course on the place — or so they had believed. Laura had carefully researched the local judges and they managed to get their case in front of a former public defender, figuring he would give them, at least, a fair shake in a county known for its hanging jurists and merciless prosecutors. This judge, Laura learned, had distinguished himself during a dark episode in Bakersfield's recent past, commonly called the Witch Hunt. Hysteria had swept the community after the “discovery” of massive rings of child molesters, some of them suspected of devil worship and human sacrifice. The wave of arrests that followed sparked a national panic about Satanic child abuse and a torrent of similar prosecutions. That such a baneful national phenomenon began not in sin-addled Los Angeles, but right here in California's heartland, became a lasting source of shame for a community that considered itself a shrine to family values — the “All America City,” as Bakersfield billed itself. Much of the evidence turned out to be bogus, but dozens of people went to prison anyway, some with sentences of hundreds of years, as the authorities sought to purge the evil — and stepped over the line from prosecution to persecution. The Witch Hunt became so pervasive that innocent mothers and fathers grew afraid to discipline or touch their own children for fear they, too, would be accused. But Laura had learned that one judge in Kern County had stood up to the hysteria, accusing the Sheriff and the District Attorney of brainwashing children and breaking the law, and he insisted on reuniting families the authorities had torn asunder. The judge was pilloried at the time, but now, six years later, he seemed a visionary, as one innocent person after another who had been falsely imprisoned during those terrible years was set free. When Laura told the defense lawyer about him, the attorney excitedly announced, “This is the judge we want."

But to their dismay, this same judge seemed to take every opportunity to rule against Laura's client. He skewered the defense regularly and with relish, seemingly always ready to take offense at the slightest suggestion, real or imagined, that the big-city, out-of-town lawyers considered him a bumpkin. His rulings had greatly bolstered what could have been a very shaky prosecution case.

Yet, even with a hostile judge and adverse rulings, Laura had given the defense attorney all the ammunition he should have needed to take apart the prosecutor's case, revealing it as a passel of unproved suspicions, outright lies and insinuations without evidence to back them up. So what if the defendant hadn't acted like the Hallmark greeting card version of a devoted, grieving husband? So what if he laughed a little when he called the sheriff's department? So what if he waited a while before calling the cops? Maybe he kept hoping against hope she would return to him. Maybe he wanted to spare her the embarrassment of telling all her friends she was losing it. So what? Laura had fought such insinuations with hard evidence and testimony that, she felt certain, demonstrated her client's innocence. She had even marched into court with the brother of the state's star witness in tow, who explained how the key testimony in the prosecution's case had been concocted. What more could a jury ask for? The D.A. had been left reeling, Laura thought, the defense lawyer, exhilarated.

The outcome seemed so obvious that, toward the end, the foreman of the jury, a country western musician with long dark hair and an oversized wooden cross around his neck, had started flashing thumbs-up signs and small, sly grins at the client's family and the defense team when he'd walk by in the hall. It was totally improper, of course, but what were they supposed to do? Complain? God, Laura thought now, if only they had.

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

It was a set up, a cruel joke. They had come to Bakersfield and figured it would be like trying a case anywhere else, cocky big-city lawyers slumming in a small town. Instead, they had stumbled on the front lines of the nation's war on crime, a buzz saw of a justice system manned by veteran, accomplished career prosecutors, juries that like to convict far more often than most towns, and a startling record of imprisoning more people per capita than most any other place in the country. Only later did Laura find out that, inside the jury room, the jury foreman with the smile and the thumbs up gestures had been leading the charge to convict. She just couldn't understand it. And she knew it wasn't just her: The other lawyer on the defense team, a veteran former prosecutor who knew a good case when he saw one, had to excuse himself to throw up after the verdict was read. The head of the private investigation firm that employed Laura had sat slack-jawed in disbelief when the clerk unfolded the scrap of paper and read the verdict. Only Laura had seen hints of things to come. Before deliberations began, her boss had offered her double or nothing on her fee if the client was found innocent, but she had said no, she'd just take her hours, win or lose, and leave it at that. Somehow, Laura had known. She had looked at the jurors and had seen what everyone else on the defense team had missed, just as she had sensed something dark and troubling below the surface of this case — and this town — from the very beginning. She had even tried to warn the others, to tell them about some of the other cases she had come across here, convictions that seemed to materialize out of thin air. There had been suspects threatened, coerced and tricked into confessing to crimes they did not necessarily commit. In some cases, remaining silent had been used as evidence of guilt instead of a constitutional right dating back to the Founding Fathers. Blacks and Hispanics complained of being routinely excluded from jury service as if this were the 1950s instead of the 1990s. The same people responsible for imprisoning innocents during the Witch Hunt days were still in power, as popular as ever, and prosecuting this case. The war on crime was out of control here, Laura had warned. The local lawyers even had a saying for it, rueful and sad, one she had heard over and over again in this courthouse. The saying was: “Only in Kern County."

But the rest of the defense team hadn't taken it seriously. The local lawyers were just whiners, it was suggested. Other cases didn't matter. Their client was one of Bakersfield's elite, rich, Republican, white, a country boy through and through. He was one of them. This one was a winner anywhere, Kern County included. They were sure of it.

“But I'm innocent,” Laura's client, a retired school principal, had whispered numbly after the jury had pronounced him guilty of murdering his wife for her millions. The defense lawyer had cried then, too, bawling like a baby right in the middle of the courtroom, and the client had tried to comfort him with a pat on the back, saying it would be all right. Which only made it worse, because everyone on the team knew that it would take something close to a miracle for it to be all right now. They'd have to fight like hell, scrape around frantically for some new bit of evidence to justify a new trial, but the satisfied look on the judge's face and the burning in Laura's stomach told her how it would likely end up: Unless she could come up with that miracle, a man she felt certain was innocent would spend the rest of his life in prison.

For now, the attorney who had been so sure of victory just a few hours earlier couldn't do a damn thing about it except cry, his face wet with angry, useless tears as his car climbed the Grapevine Pass and raced toward the Kern County line. Laura envied him his escape. It was up to her now, to knock on more doors, to ask more questions, to search for answers she thought she already had found, but which twelve seemingly reasonable people had rejected. If there was to be a reversal of this verdict and a new trial for her client, she would have to start from scratch now, she would have to unearth new answers, once again pondering who killed Alexandra Dunn, and why — and what forces were at work in this place that led to her client's conviction. And given the confidence-shattering verdict, she'd be a fool not to entertain another possibility: Could she have been all wrong about this evidence, this town, this client? Might it be that this irascible man with his stubborn streak and ill-timed quips — whom Laura nevertheless had come to care for deeply — had killed his wife after all?

“You're not gonna give up on this old man, are you, Laura?” the client whispered to her as she gathered her files to leave the courtroom. His eyes were wide and glassy. Shock, Laura thought to herself, and she forced a smile, feeling guilty for the questions she had been silently pondering -- yet part of her still calculating, wondering, even then: Was it all an act? Then Patrick O'Dale Dunn's papery voice called out to her again, sounding harsh and loud in the empty courtroom, though is voice remained a whisper. The room suddenly seemed musty and disused with the crowd departed, as if Pat's fate had just been written into some old and seldom-opened book. “You still believe in me, don't you?” he pleaded.

Laura stared at him a long time before she finally nodded and answered, a sad half smile on her lips: “Only in Kern County."

---

Mean Justice Excerpt 2

The Witchhunt

April 1983 — There is a special interview room in the Kern County District Attorney's Office. It has a toy box and dishes of candy and crayoned pictures adorning the walls, though none of these accessories can make this room a happy space. Decidedly unhappy stories are told here, pulled like decayed teeth from the mouths of the small and the vulnerable.

On this day, the room reeks of pain. A six-year-old boy cries mournfully. Between sobs he says, “I miss my mommy.” A prosecutor and a sheriff's detective try to calm him, shutting the tape recorder on and off as they alternate between the questions and answers of an official interview, and comforting whispers that everything will be okay, everything will be okay. The two men in the room would have liked to let this little boy alone, but they had to have the truth.

This was a very different sort of interrogation than the normal exchange between cop and suspect. This was delicate, tough, grueling, a prying of secrets not from a crook but from a victim, and a child victim at that, in a case that was tearing a town apart.

Unfolding in this room like some twisted stage play was Bakersfield's crime of the century, or so the cops and the prosecutors kept telling one another in excited asides. What started out as an investigation of one father accused of molesting one daughter — originally thought to be a misdemeanor at that — had mushroomed into an enormous case, a hideous case, an unthinkable ring of child molesters. Members of prominent families were involved, even a county social worker who handled adoptions, for Christsakes. It seemed these monsters were selling their own kids for sex out of sleazy motels, shooting kiddie porn, maybe even snuff films, staging orgies, drugging and defiling children, then threatening them with death if they talked. The grandmother of one of the kids had coaxed and teased the story to the surface, then called the cops. Now the scandal of it — the terror of it — had just begun to reverberate throughout Bakersfield, where most people believed themselves immunized by distance and determination from the big-city horrors two freeway hours to the south. This case had crashed into the city like a force of nature, like one of the floods that transforms a dry sand lot in the middle of town — the dusty bed of this once-mighty branch of the Kern River — back into the raging torrent it used to be before a boom of houses and farms sucked it dry.

This new, terrible flood had to be understood, contained, defeated. Bakersfield wanted its children safe and the monsters put away. The problem was, some of the kids — like this boy in the interview room — had said nothing had happened. He had never been molested. But the prosecutor and sheriff's deputy did not believe this, and so they question the six-year-old insistently, even mercilessly, prodding, leading, urging him to tell it all. When he denies something happened — as he keeps trying to do — they press him until he says otherwise. Well, your brother told us about the men in motel rooms doing things to your butts with their penises. You know the word penis, don't you? Your brother wouldn't tell us a lie, would he?

And when there is hesitation still, the inquisitors say to this little boy who desperately misses his parents, who has been swept from his mother's arms by men with guns and uniforms, that the only way they can help his mommy and daddy is if he tells the truth. And they make it abundantly clear that the truth, so far as they are concerned, is a tale of grotesque molestation. Anything else has to be a lie. So after a while, the boy starts saying yes to their questions. Anything to get it over with. Even then, the inquisitors cannot get everything they want. They keep zeroing in on the motels, places where kids have been sold for sex -- the heart of their case if they are to make the sex slavery charges stick. The grandmother had told the police about the motels and the money, and they want the kids confirm it.

“Okay. While you were there, did you see any money?” the prosecutor asks.

The boy shakes his head. “No.”

The prosecutor repeats the question, as if the boy had not answered. “Did you see any money in the room?

“Uh-uh.”

“You see your mom and dad have any money?”

“No.”

This goes on for a time, until the boy finally is pushed into saying yes, there was money. But he then describes the implausible scenario of seeing six naked strangers running from of a motel room orgy with wads of money in their fists. To the interrogators' frustration, the boy still insists these people gave no money to his parents. They just ran naked into a public parking lot with it.

Later, the tape of this interview is filed away and kept secret. The official report on the interview written the next day — the one given to the dreaded defense attorneys — says nothing about money or the boy's initial denials.

The boy is questioned in this way dozens of times over a period of months — but never again on tape. He is not allowed to see his family. After a while, he stops denying that “the bad things” happened, and his story, at least as it is told in the official reports, slowly evolves until it matches everything the police suspect, and more. The same progression occurs with his brother and two other child victims.— After eighteen months in a foster home, without once seeing his parents but with regular question and answer sessions with his official inquisitors who pry ever more salacious details from him, the boy marches into court where his mother, father and their two friends are on trial. Now seven years old, the boy sits stiffly, as if drained of emotion. His entire life for a year-and-a-half has consisted of cops and attorneys and social workers and most of all questions, over and over, about “the bad things.” Now the prosecutor hones in on the money issue that so frustrated the interrogators at the outset. “What word was that you used to call the strangers?” he asks the boy.

“Customers,” the boy answers without hesitation.

“Customers,” the district attorney repeats, emphasizing a word the boy hadn't used or even seemed to know during the long-ago taped interrogation. “Did I tell you that word?” the prosecutor asks for the benefit of the jury. “Or did you tell me?"

“I told you that word.” The boy then describes how the customers in the motel would molest him and the other kids, then give money to his parents. As he speaks, he rarely looks at his mother or father. He has somehow come to believe they hate him and wish he would die.

When the defense attorney's turn comes, he asks if the prosecutor had helped the boy “remember” that customers had given his parents money.

Again, the boy answers without hesitation. “Yes.”

It doesn't matter, though. The jurors are certain — just as the detectives and the prosecutors are certain — that no child could ever be convinced to lie about such horrendous things, especially when it involves the kid's own parents. They might lie to cover up a molestation, to protect their parents from arrest or themselves from embarrassment, but they would never lie the other way. Couldn't happen. You couldn't make it happen if you wanted to. That's why they know subjecting the kids to high-pressure interrogations was okay. That's how you get the truth, the tortuous, slow, unpleasant work of breaking down a child's insistence that nothing happened. You had to lead them, explain that you already knew the truth, ignore the denials until they start agreeing with you. Then all the kids have to do is answer yes. It's easier for them that way. That's how you save a kid — and a community — from monsters.

The boy's young parents, a machinist and a Sunday School teacher, were convicted of massive counts of child molestation. Together with the other couple on trial with them, they received sentences of over one thousand years in prison. It was, Kern County District Attorney Ed Jagels said, one of Bakersfield's finest moments.

It was also just the beginning.

Start here: How the wrong guy can end up in prison

Mean Justice Update: a national snapshot. Also, the latest on appeals by Pat Dunn (central character in Mean Justice), new evidence of his wrongful conviction, and other miscarriages of justice in the toughest town on crime in America.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors. Read the fatal outcome of the arrest of Pat Dunn’s son, Danny, for a minor offense.

Prosecutorial misconduct Q & A Questions and answers about prosecutorial misconduct and wrongful convictions — why they happen, what’s being done about it, and why you should care.

The Toll of Misconduct A short selection of some of the cases of official errors and misconduct that have led to miscarriages of justice and unjust imprisonments.

How the media covers — and doesn’t cover — prosecutorial misconduct. From an address by author Edward Humes to the national conference of Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE).

How to assess possible cases of wrongful conviction A resource for journalists and others interested in the subject. Distributed at the national conference of Investigative Reporters & Editors.

DA Blues - When do politics interfere with prosecution? Consider the case of a prominent physician accused of terroristic threats but represented by a politically connected attorney, and you’ll see how justice is not necessarily blind. From an article by Edward Humes in Los Angeles Magazine.

Jerome Valenta — Read Edward Humes’ account of a gadfly and advocate for parolees who was sentenced to seven years in prison for tape- recording non-confidential conversations with law-enforcement officials. From prison, he penned his own appeals and won his freedom, proving he was the victim of gross prosecutorial misconduct by the same officials who imprisoned Pat Dunn.

Prosecutorial Misconduct Discussion. Listen to an in-depth interview with Mean Justice author Edward Humes at AnnOnline, in Real Audio.

 

Dig Deeper:Prosecutorial Misconduct and Wrongful Convictions

The Innocence Project DNA exonerations by organization headed by attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. More than 100 innocents have been freed from prison as of February 2002. Click here for a listing of other innocence projects around the country.

Overzealous prosecutions. Read the Los Angeles Times article on prosecutorial controversies in California’s heartland.

Ritual Abuse Links — An examination of the Bakersfield Witchhunt and other similar cases of wrongful prosecution revolving around false allegations of mass child abuse, molestation and devil worship.

Bennett Gershman — Pace University law professor, ex-prosecutor and expert on prosecutorial misconduct speaks to Frontline on the mindset that leads to wrongful prosecutions. Writes Gershman, in his seminal book Prosecutorial Misconduct:

It becomes inescapably clear that the prosecutor, for good or ill, is the most powerful figure in the criminal justice system... (His) power to charge, plea bargain, grant immunity, and coerce evidence is largely uncontrolled... Acts of misconduct by prosecutors are recurrent, pervasive, and very serious... Restraints on prosecutorial misconduct are either meaningless or nonexistent. —Prosecutorial Misconduct, Bennett Gershman, professor of law and former prosecutor

Trial and Error, the Chicago Tribune’s excellent 5-part series on prosecutorial misconduct, including one of the most systematic attempts to quantify a problem that is notoriously difficult to track. By Ken Armstrong and Maurice Possley. Many of the cases are discussed in Mean Justice. Listen to Possley interviewed on Weekend Edition on NPR in Real Audio on the subject of prosecutorial misconduct.

Discussion of Prosecutorial Misconduct on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

Win at All Costs , the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s 10- part series examining cases of prosecutorial misconduct and other allegations of ethical lapses by federal prosecutors. By Bill Moushey. The Justice Department has asserted that the articles were biased and error-laden. Read the articles and then check out Justice's response, then judge for yourself.

One out of Seven For every seven executions in America since the death penalty was restored in the 1970s, one condemned man has been released from death row because he turned out to be innocent.

Death Penalty Information Center. An excellent compendium of statistics, reports and case studies of cases of wrongful convictions and death sentences. You don't have to be anti-death penalty in your beliefs to appreciate these harrowing tales of innocent men and women condemned to death row.

Columbia Journalism Review on wrongful convictions and the media.

The Case for Innocence. Excellent Frontline special on PBS about wrongful convictions and the promise of DNA testing.

Error rates in Capital cases Read the study that has sparked new debates about the death penalty and the possibility that the innocent could be put to death, given the 65% rate of convictions overturned in death cases. This study was commissioned by the U.S. Senate, and is provided on the web by The Justice Project.org. Click here to read a transcript of the study’s author, Professor James Liebman, hosting a chat on Court TV Online.

Convicted by Juries, Exonerated by Science — Ground breaking Justice Department report on cases that led to criminal conviction and, often, a death sentence, that were subsequently overturned when DNA proved the wrong man had been imprisoned. This report, along with the work at Northwestern University and Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld’s Innocence Project, have stimulated the national concern over injustice and false convictions now sparking a long-delayed but much overdue debate about prosecutorial power and abuses, and the justice system's general unwillingness to concede the errors that arise from these abuses and correct them.

Death Penalty on Trial Special report from Court TV Online looks at all sides of the issue, with case histories.

Power to Harm, the Seattle Post- Intelligencer’s superb in-depth examination of errors and improprieties in the investigation and prosecution of dozens of citizens in Wenatchee, Washington, where allegations that massive rings of molesters and ritual abusers were preying on children have nearly destroyed the town. The case has a startling resemblance to the dozens of now-discredited prosecutions in Kern County, the setting for Mean Justice.

Wang vs. Reno, appellate opinion on a misconduct in which it was found that a federal prosecutor had relied upon statements obtained from a witness through torture by Chinese authorities. To make matters worse, when the witness disavowed the testimony as lies designed to stop the torture, the prosecutor threatened his “star” witness with deportation to China and certain death if he failed to assist the U.S. government with his original, false testimony.

US vs. Kojayan, a cogent statement of a prosecutor’s responsibility from a conservative justice appointed by President Reagan and outraged by the misconduct of a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles. Recognition of the awesome power of the state — and the temptation very human prosecutors must wrestle with to avoid abusing that power — is not a liberal vs. conservative issue. It should be, Kojayan shows, the concern of Americans of every political persuasion:

Much of what the United States Attorney’s office does isn’t open to public scrutiny or judicial review.... It is therefore particularly important that the government discharge its responsibilities fairly, consistent with due process. The overwhelming majority of prosecutors are decent, ethical, honorable lawyers who understand the awesome power they wield, and the responsibility that goes with it. But the temptation is always there: It’s the easiest thing in the world for people trained in the adversarial ethic to think a prosecutor’s job is simply to win.

Berger vs. U.S., the 1935 landmark case on what consistutes prosecutorial misconduct, its poetic language still cited as the standard by which the ethics of prosecutors (federal, state and local) are judged:

The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor — indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.

Office of Professional Responsibility. Read the most recent Department of Justice annual report on how it investigates complaints of prosecutorial misconduct. (DOJ is the only prosecutorial agency in the country that reports publicly on misconduct by its attorneys — with OPR serving as its own “internal affairs” unit.)

Miranda and other decisions A critique of the famous Miranda ruling requiring, among other things, the “reading of rights” to individuals arrested, along with a look at other important criminal justice court rulings — all from a disapproving prosecutor’s perspective.

Wickersham. The last time the government undertook a systematic investigation of prosecutorial and police misconduct in the nation, and sought solutions to the problem, it was undertaken by the Wickersham Commission ... appointed by Herbert Hoover in 1929. The commission made groundbreaking findings — which led to, among other things, the gradual end of the “Third Degree,” as the practice of using physical duress and torture to coerce confessions was known.

Crossing the Line. Ohio chief justice takes prosecutors to task for misconduct in death penalty cases.

Dig Deeper: Ritual Abuse and Witchhunt Information

Kern County, the setting for Mean Justice, was the nation’s prosecutorial birthplace for a wave of large- scale “molestation ring” and ritual abuse cases that eventually ripped through the nation, the most famous of which was the McMartin Preschool case in Los Angeles, and some of which persist to this day (as in Wenatchee, Washington). No place investigated and prosecuted more such cases than Kern County; most of the cases have been discredited with most of the convicted going free — after many years behind bars. Coercion of child witnesses, bogus medical evidence, and the hiding of evidence of innocence in the possession of Kern County authorities lay at the root of these false convictions — for which no one in law enforcement has ever been held accountable. What follows is an assortment of links for learning more about such cases and the bitter lessons they offer.

Mean Justice excerpt on the Bakersfield Witchhunt cases. Additional background on the Kniffen case is available, courtesy of the Bakersfield Californian newspaper.

Power to Harm, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's superb in-depth examination of errors and improprieties in the investigation and prosecution of dozens of citizens in Wenatchee, Washington, where allegations that massive rings of molesters and ritual abusers were preying on children have nearly destroyed the town. The case has a startling resemblance to the dozens of now-discredited prosecutions in Kern County, the setting for Mean Justice.

Breezy Point Another enormous ritual abuse case against children that created enormous panic in Bucks County, Penn., ground to a halt when a highly principled district attorney refused to be sucked in and instead raised questions about the quality of evidence and investigation laid before him. He ended up throwing the case out — a courageous act in the mid 1980s, when satanic panic had gripped much of the nation. He later recalled:

I wanted to try the case myself ... I was convinced it would be the greatest case in the history of my Commonwealth. But there was no evidence at all ... I was instead convinced this was the greatest hoax in the history of my Commonwealth ... The parents thought I was some victim of Witchcraft ... But it was all the product of a shared hysteria... We proved that none of this ever happened ... This wasn’t a question of maybe it happened and we just can’t prove it. This was conjured up by the hysteria of the parents who bought into this. It never happened.

40 ritual abuses cases that led to community hysteria, massive prosecutions, and that produced wrongful convictions, most of them overturned or discredited.

FBI Report on Ritual Abuse Cases. This report examining whether or not large-scale ritual and satanic abuse exists, written by Kenneth Lanning, head of the FBI’s behavioral sciences unit, remains the definitive analysis on the subject. He builds a meticulous and unbiased review, concluding, in essence, that they are NOT out there. Courtesy of the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance website. Another federal study, this one by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, also found no evidence to support claims by certain therapists and their patients of a satanic underground specializing in child molestation (or any other criminal activity).

McMartin Preschool — The most notorious and well-known of the original ritual abuse cases, McMartin helped start a national panic, only to be discredited years later. It followed the first of the Bakersfield Witchhunt cases chronologically — and in its pattern of therapists, detectives and prosecutors coercing false information from young children, inadvertently abusing them in the name of saving them.

Frontline: Innocence Lost. The PBS series documents one of the major ritual abuse cases — the Little Rascals day-care case in North Carolina. Extensive site also contains information on many other cases.

San Diego County Grand Jury report on official improprieties and false accusations in ritual abuse cases. The report was made in the wake of the notorious and, by most accounts (including the jury’s), unjust prosecution of a developmentally disabled man named Dale Akiki.

Jeopardy in the Courtroom Psychologists Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck have written a definitive book on the coercive and suggesting questioning of child witnesses that led to most of the false witchhunt convictions. Bruck was a key witness in many of the overturned Bakersfield Witchhunt convictions. She was lauded by judges for her fairness, objectivity and careful opinions, making her one of the most credible experts around on this difficult and emotional subject. Click here for excerpts.

Witchhunt Links page A variety of links to sites related to ritual abuse, some of them good, some of questionable merit, but worth a look for those interested in the subject.

Elizabeth Loftus — A collection of articles from the most famous expert — from the debunker side of the question — on the phenomenon of repressed memories. Loftus’s work has been instrumental in showing how well-meaning (and less-than-honorable) investigators, therapists and prosecutors have coerced children into making false accusations in abuse cases while mistaking these accusations for “repressed” memories coaxed to the surface. The research of Loftus and a growing number of other psychologists and memory researchers suggests that the vast majority of these so-called repressed memories are unreliable, and that the sort of leading and suggestive questioning typically done by investigators and others probing child abuse cases is very likely to produce false information. The Bakersfield cases have been cited as models of how NOT to question children.

Fells Acres Also known as the Amirault case, this Massachusetts case is one of the most notorious and twisted of the Witchhunt prosecutions, in which one defendant was exonerated, another died of cancer while awaiting the result of her appeal (and was posthumously exonerated), and a third — whose evidence of innocence is just as compelling as the defendant who was freed — remains in prison. Read the latest developments in A Juror Has Second Thoughts, from the Wall Street Journal, and this site, by one of the Amiraults’ appellate attorneys, that gives a complete synopsis of testimony in favor of exoneration.