McMartin Preschool Trial(英)

Child protection groups and parents pressured prosecutors to retry Ray Buckey on the charges on which the first jury deadlocked. Five hundred people, including many McMartin parents, marched through the stree

ts of Manhattan Beach carrying signs such as "We believe the children." One McMartin parent called the verdict in the first trial "a crime……almost equal to the crime that occurred outside the courtroom." A television poll showed 87% of respondents thought the Buckeys guilty.

　　District Attorney Ira Reiner signed off on the retrial. Two new prosecutors were assigned to the case, Joe Martinez and Pamela Ferrero. The second trial also saw a new judge, following a successful motion by defense attorney Daniel Davis to have Judge Pounders removed from the case. Pounders expressed relief at the development: "I'm finally free after three years and three months. I was honestly afraid I couldn't live through it." Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg was assigned to replace Pounders.

　　The second trial was a much more focused proceeding, involving only eight counts of molestation and three children. The prosecution presented its entire case in just thirteen days (compared to fifteen months in the first trial) and offered only eleven witnesses. One of the witnesses was a mother who, on the stand, glared at Ray Buckey and announced, "I'm so angry at you, I could kill you right now." The prosecution chose not to call CII interviewer Kee MacFarlane; instead, MacFarlane was called as a defense witness.

　　Jury deliberations after the three-month trial were described by one juror as "excruciating." The jury ended its deliberations deadlocked on all eight counts. The jury leaned toward acquittal on six of the counts, and leaned toward conviction on only one count.

　　Following the mistrial, District Attorney Reiner chose not to retry Buckey a third time and all charges against him were dismissed.

　　The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial was costly in many ways. In monetary terms, it cost taxpayers over $15 million dollars. For the defendants, the costs of the trial included long terms in jail (Ray Buckey spent five years in jail before being released on bail), loss of homes, loss of jobs, loss of life savings, and a stigma that might never leave. The children too were victims. Ray Buckey in a CBS interview said: "Those poor children went through hell,……but I'm not the cause of their hell and neither is my mother……The cause of their hell is the ……adults who took this case and made it what it was." Parents, too, suffered. Many felt betrayed by the justice system. The community of Manhattan Beach was another victim, left uneasy and polarized by the long investigation and judicial proceedings.

　　The effects of the McMartin trial even extended beyond the state of California. Across the country, day care providers resisted the temptation to hug or touch children——contact almost all child experts say children need——out of a fear that their actions might be interpreted as signs of abuse. Many day care centers were forced to close their doors after insurance companies, fearing molestation lawsuits, dramatically raised liability insurance rates. Early publicity surrounding the McMartin investigation also spawned a rash of charges against day care providers elsewhere. A 1990 study indicated that 80% of the charges against day care givers later turned out to be unsubstantiated.

　　There are many lessons to be learned from the McMartin Preschool Trial. There are lessons for police and prosecutors, but there are also lessons for the media. It was "pack journalism"——slanted heavily toward the prosecution, providing sensational headlines day after day, almost never seriously questioning the allegations——that turned the McMartin trial into the expensive and damaging fiasco that it became

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