Buckey Lawyer Likens McMartin Case to Witch Trials of 1600s

Comparing the McMartin Pre-School molestation case to the Salem witch trials, the McCarthy hearings and the Vietnam War, a defense lawyer urged jurors Friday not to make Ray Buckey a scapegoat of the current “American child movement.”

“You and I are a chunk of history,” he said during the second of an estimated four days of final arguments. “You are a part of a great social change.”

Danny Davis cautioned the jury not to get caught up in a popular notion, but to think for themselves and follow the law. Finding Buckey guilty, he said, would be tantamount to “burning a scapegoat.”

Buckey, 31, and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 62, are charged with 65 counts of molestation and conspiracy involving 11 youngsters who attended their family owned Manhattan Beach nursery school in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

In his wide-ranging commentary on various epochs in American history, Davis appeared to be saying that decisions often reflect public opinion rather than truth. In the 1600s, for example, innocent people were burned as witches; in the 1950s, innocent people were branded and blacklisted as communists.

Today, in a time when society has become aware of widespread child abuse and concerned about children’s rights, innocent people may be convicted of molestation. Pacing in front of the jury box and looking at the individual panelists, Davis argued that:

* Ray Buckey was not at the school when the older children--whom he labeled “the fraudulent four”--attended.

* Prosecutors had failed to prove that the alleged acts happened within the six-year statute of limitations.

* Two of the alleged victims refused to testify.

* Those nine children who did testify related horrible crimes without emotion, in flat tones and “almost indifference to these people” they were accusing.

* There were material changes in the children’s testimony throughout the lengthy proceedings.

* A letter about the investigation sent to parents by the Manhattan Beach Police Department triggered alarm about whether or not “he (Buckey) got to my child.”

Davis said Manhattan Beach families were “drawn into the ambitions of a handful of carpetbaggers”--a reference to interviewers at Children’s Institute International, where hundreds of children were diagnosed as molestation victims, and to politically motivated prosecutors.

Parents not only had to face the possibility that their children had been molested, he said, but to deal with guilt feelings about having sent them off to the nursery school while the parents went off to play tennis at the country club or to meetings of a local social group called the Sandpipers.

“Parents were caught in a dramatic dilemma: ‘Either my child was molested . . . or I bought the biggest sham in the 1980s in Los Angeles County.’ ”

Once persuaded by viewing portions of videotaped interviews with their children and learning the results of their medical exams, parents have had to “hold onto” their belief, Davis said.

“You’re over the edge . . . you cannot now say, ‘Maybe it didn’t happen,’ ” he said.

After closing arguments by Deputy Dist. Atty. Lael Rubin next week, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William Pounders will give lengthy instructions to the jury. Deliberations could start as early as Halloween.

Many observers said that the jury--whose members often look bored--appears to have already made up its mind and should reach a quick verdict: guilty if its members believe the children; not guilty if they believe the teachers. If, however, they sift through all the evidences, Pounders has said a verdict might take several months.