Word: mcmartins
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...counts of sexually abusing a dozen children at his preschool in this remote town perched on the edge of Albemarle Sound.The verdict brought to an end the longest (eight months) and most expensive (estimated cost: $1.2 million) trial in North Carolina history. Often compared with California's landmark McMartin Pre-School case, whose defendants were ultimately acquitted, the trial aroused heated passions in the bucolic community of Edenton, where many residents were torn between outrage over the alleged crimes and fears that they had unleashed a witch hunt...
Loftus, co-author of Witness for the Defense (St. Martin's Press; $19.95) and an expert witness on memory in the cases involving the McMartin Preschool, Oliver North and the Hillside Strangler, speculates that such prestige- enhancing revisionism by Thomas could be one explanation for why his memory differs so radically from Hill's. Thomas is a "rigid person who insisted on the prerogatives of his position," observes Emory's Neisser; such people can be "good repressers" of unpleasant memories. As for Hill, Loftus suggests that it is possible she unconsciously confused some past experiences. "Could she have gotten...
Some horror stories are chilling because they might be true. The horror stories in the McMartin Pre-School trial are chilling for a different reason: despite seven years of investigations and trials, it may never be known whether they are true or false. In a Los Angeles courtroom last week, the jury in the child-molestation trial of Raymond Buckey, 32, a former teacher at the Manhattan Beach, Calif., preschool, declared itself deadlocked. With that, the state decided to drop the charges. Said prosecutor Joseph Martinez: "How long can you keep this...
Outside the courtroom, Buckey embraced his father with tears in his eyes and said, "It's all over." It was the second mistrial for Buckey, whose mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, had been acquitted of similar charges in January after the longest trial in U.S. history. That jury had been unable to reach a decision on all the counts against Raymond. Prosecutors then made their second attempt to convict him, this time on charges of molesting three of the children, girls who are now ages 11 to 13. Buckey spent five years in prison awaiting his day in court. The bill...
...allegations of child abuse. It spurred a national debate about appropriate methods for eliciting testimony from children. It has left many of the children and their parents bitter. And it put Ray Buckey in jail for five years without a conviction. "I don't think anybody won in the McMartin case," Buckey says now. But quite a few people lost...