Jesse Friedman: Convicted abuser - is he a victim of 'a vast moral panic?'

NY Times  Early in “Capturing the Friedmans,” the 2003 documentary that tells the harrowing story of a father and son charged in 1987 with the brutal sexual abuse of children on Long Island, one of the detectives on the case recalls her hesitation in the face of intense pressure from parents to prosecute quickly.

“Just charging somebody with this kind of a crime is enough to ruin their lives,” she said. “So you want to make sure that you have enough evidence, and that you’re convinced that you’re making a good charge.”

On Tuesday, the son, Jesse Friedman, who was released in 2001 after serving 13 years in prison, will be back in court, arguing once again for the disclosure of that evidence, which he says will help to prove his innocence. Twenty-seven years after he was first charged, prosecutors still refuse to give it to him.

From the beginning, the case was deeply flawed. The only evidence that Jesse and his father, Arnold, had abused anyone consisted of statements to the police by children and one of Jesse’s friends. Many of the statements were made after repeated or hourslong visits from detectives who would not leave until they heard what they wanted. None of the children had previously complained to anyone of any abuse. [...]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, similar cases were playing out across the country: extreme, often implausible allegations of mass sexual abuse of children by child care workers, leading to dozens of prosecutions and convictions. One federal appeals court has described the mood of the time as a “vast moral panic.”

The problem was that most of the charges weren’t true. Decades later, almost all the convictions of that era have been reversed. [...]

But Mr. Friedman says he pleaded guilty under the threat of an effective life sentence if he were convicted at trial.

In the years since his release, Mr. Friedman has been developing a case to clear his name, with the help of his lawyers and the documentary’s director, Andrew Jarecki. Among other things, the prosecution’s only adult witness has recanted, as have five of the children who said they had been abused. More than two dozen eyewitnesses at the computer classes where the abuse was allegedly committed now say no abuse occurred. Many students told investigators this at the time, but prosecutors did not share that with Mr. Friedman’s lawyer. [....]

In 2010, the federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said “the police, prosecutors, and the judge did everything they could to coerce a guilty plea and avoid a trial,” and that there was a “reasonable likelihood” Mr. Friedman had been wrongfully convicted.

That concern was echoed by the only person outside the Nassau County district attorney’s office to have seen the full 17,000-page file in the Friedman case — a state trial judge named F. Dana Winslow. In 2013, after reviewing the file along with new pieces of evidence, Mr. Winslow ordered prosecutors to turn over “every piece of paper” generated in the case against Mr. Friedman, with a handful of names redacted. That has still not happened.

The [D.A. ]office says it re-confirmed Mr. Friedman’s guilt in a three-year, 155-page report it released in 2013, purporting to re-investigate the case. But whether or not Mr. Friedman can establish his innocence is for a court to decide, not for the prosecutors who tried the case in the first place. [...]

There have long been grave questions about the prosecution and guilty plea. And innocent people plead guilty surprisingly often. At the very least, Mr. Friedman — whose life has already been ruined — should be given a real chance to prove his innocence in court. If the Nassau County district attorney’s office is so confident of his guilt, and of the legitimacy of its prosecution, what is it afraid of?