McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial (1987-90)

"They're putting on witnesses who they know are lying. They concealed exonerating evidence. Don't we have enough criminal conduct by the prosecutors to put them behind bars?"
"It doesn't work that way," the lawyer laughed. "The law is just for the little people. When we break the rules we go to jail. When they break the rules they go to lunch...."
"But what about the law?" the woman gasped. "What about the Constitution?"
"I'm afraid that's just one of those nice, comforting fantasies like the tooth fairy. There are two classes of people. Those who hold power and those who do not. And in any dispute the guys who hold power will decide which way it's going to go....I hope you understand that this is not about child abuse, just as McCarthyism was not about Communists."
--- Eberle, Paul and Shirley. The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial ( 1993) (reporting a discussion between a friend of the Buckeys and a defense lawyer)

The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history, should serve as a cautionary tale. When it was all over, the government had spent seven years and $15 million dollars investigating and prosecuting a case that led to no convictions. More seriously, the McMartin case left in its wake hundreds of emotionally damaged children, as well as ruined careers for members of the McMartin staff. No one paid a bigger price than Ray Buckey, one of the principal defendants in the case, who spent five years in jail awaiting trial for a crime (most people recognize today) he never committed. McMartin juror Brenda Williams said that the trial experience taught her to be more cautious: "I now realize how easily something can be said and misinterpreted and blown out of proportion." Another juror, Mark Bassett, singled out "experts" for blame: "I thought some of the expert testimony about the children told you more about the expert than the child. I mean, if the expert says children are always 100% believable and then you have a child who is not believable, either the expert is extremely biased or they've never seen anything like that child before."

The McMartin trial had its origins in a call placed to police in Manhattan Beach, California by Judy Johnson, the mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old son who attended the McMartin Preschool on about ten occasions in 1983. Johnson told Detective Jane Hoag that a school aide, Ray Buckey, the 25-year-old son of the owner of the preschool, had molested her son. Despite the fact that the young boy was unable to identify Ray from photos and medical investigations of the boy showed no signs of sexual abuse, the police conducted searches of Buckey's home, confiscating such "evidence" as a rubber duck, a graduation robe, a Teddy bear, and Playboy magazines. Detective Hoag arrested Buckey on September 7, 1983...Continued