A Verdict in a Very Sad Case

The McMartin Pre-School case was a trial without victors, only survivors. It was a case that lasted 78 months, cost $15 million just in court expenses, and at times turned the Southland upside down. It is hard to say that we are all better for the experience. It is safe to say that it is an unhappy and upsetting one in almost every respect.

Raymond Buckey, 3l, and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, 63, have been judged innocent on 52 counts, but they will never be entirely free of stigma. Many parents of the 41 children involved in the case will never accept the verdict. And Superior Judge William Pounders, who presided over the 2 1/2 years of actual trial, said the case “poisoned everyone who had contact with it”--children, parents, witnesses, litigants, judicial officers. As David Shaw writes elsewhere in The Times today, radio, television and the print press belonged on the list.

How could investigators, even onlookers, miss the many warning signals on the trail along which this case plunged like some wayward tank? A disaffected prosecutor called the case “junk” months ago. And Judy Johnson, mother of the McMartin child who made the original charge, later added the astonishing claim that an AWOL Marine sodomized her family’s dog. Nobody paid attention to the flashing lights that said that this was at best a bizarre case.

Another question is whether there is anything in the record of the trial could make even a sliver of the squandering of time and reputations worthwhile?

Answers to the first question must be largely conjecture. When the McMartin allegations surfaced, Americans were only dimly aware that such things ever happened; then the hysteria helped make it seem that they happened everywhere all of the time. From one extreme to the other.

The media’s lessons already are sinking in. One is that skepticism is never more important than when government officials make things so sensational as to be irresistible. This is not the end of this case, perhaps. But if this terrible ordeal is to have any lasting value, it should make everybody be better prepared to handle the next terrible case of alleged child molestation.

The other question is easier to deal with. Lael Rubin, chief prosecutor for the final six months of trial, said the McMartin case made clear a need for better techniques of questioning, and understanding the answers of, children who may have been molested. Whatever really happened in the McMartin case, children are, and will be, molested. Surely the longest criminal trial in history will yield the longest list of the right ways and wrong ways to approach such cases so that justice can be done without repeating the grotesqueries of this case. We owe at least that to our children.