Juror left to ponder fallout of reversals
| Saturday, May 02 2009 08:16 PM
Last Updated Saturday, May 02 2009 08:16 PM
If it seems like everyone associated with the Bakersfield child molestation convictions of the 1980s is now officially a casualty of justice gone awry, that's because, in one sense or another, they are.
In the past few weeks, thanks to the documentary "Witch Hunt," we have (again) heard the stories of the accused: The convictions, the reversals, the ongoing quests for vindication. Though the question of their innocence will never be definitively resolved, they are essentially victims of the flawed investigations.
Then, of course, there are the children. Regardless of whether they were truly molested or merely convinced they'd been molested, they've endured emotional trauma that might always be with them.
To that group of irreparably damaged people, add the many dozens of jurors who sat through weeks upon weeks of horrifying testimony, deliberated faithfully, and then rendered the only verdicts they felt possible: guilty.
Time and the failures of the others have rendered their efforts moot, invalid, faulty -- and it hurts. Their burdens hardly compare with those of the central players, but they are burdens nonetheless.
Jurors didn't conduct the taped interviews that ultimately led to the dismissal of charges for 24 of the 27 men and women who were convicted. Jurors didn't ask the questions that were eventually deemed as leading, didn't listen to the children's taped answers later dismissed as having been coached, intentionally or not. Jurors didn't even hear those tapes -- for a time, prosecutors claimed they didn't exist.
But jurors did see those children on the witness stand. They did see the blanched faces, the averted eyes, the innocent terror. At least that's how one juror perceived what she was seeing. "I could live with being wrong," said Mary K. Stanley, "if I thought I was wrong."
Stanley can speak to only one case -- the Pitts trial, which ran from January 1985 to August 1985.
"We were very, very conscientious in the application of our duties," said Stanley, a registered nurse (with a specialty in pediatrics) who filled 14 legal-size pads with notes, quotes and impressions during the course of the trial.
"It was not only the questions that were asked but the behavior and the body language," she said, speaking two days after actor-producer Sean Penn came to town for an after-the-fact "premiere" of the documentary at the Fox Theater.
If any prosecutor seemed to put words in a child's mouth on the witness stand, she didn't hear them. "I can't speak to what was said outside the courtroom," she said, "but what I saw was properly done."
She watched what she describes as a gut-wrenching display of abject fear unfolding in front of her eyes as a 5-year- old child's face went white with terror the moment she spotted the accused. Nothing Stanley observed that day, she said, could have been manipulated, programmed, orchestrated or contrived.
But couldn't that child's fear have been instilled by overzealous interviewers outside the courtroom? Not likely, Stanley said. Not alongside the other testimony.
"The kids were acting out sexually on the playground with their 5- and 6-year old playmates," she noted, "and the school officials were saying, 'What's going on here?'"
Didn't it strike her as troubling that so many molestation cases were suddenly cropping up? Certainly.
"I thought it was astounding that this many people could be involved in child molestation -- I did think that. ... But I think it was a time that we began to discover that these unaccepted behaviors were taking place," Stanley said.
Maybe so. And therein lies the agony of this uncertainty, this everlasting doubt. No settlement dollar amount will ever bring back that time lost to prison. No words of apology or forgiveness or explanation will ever bring back those lost years of childhood. And no appellate judge's decision will ever negate the sense of darkness that at least one juror still believes she saw and touched.
Reach Robert Price at rprice@bakersfield.com.
