Legal Experts Believe Case Was Bungled

Most legal experts say that the McMartin Pre-School molestation case was mishandled from the beginning, calling the 6-year-old case a “fiasco,” “a worst-case scenario” and a prime example of “Murphy’s law,” the maxim that says anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

While the case was not the first of its kind, it was by far the largest, turning the police and prosecutors who handled it into “pioneers” who came up with procedures as they went along, the experts say. They made lots of mistakes.

The biggest was in not paring the case down to manageable size. The case simply got out of hand.

In fact, long before jurors announced their acquittals in the marathon proceeding, the trial judge had rendered his own verdict. Superior Court Judge William R. Pounders said the case had “poisoned” the lives of everyone it touched.

The alleged victims and their families had endured a nightmare since making the allegations in 1983. So had the defendants.

Trial jurors had given up nearly three years of their lives before finding that the defendants were--if not entirely innocent--then at least not proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Three people associated with the case had died under mysterious circumstances.

And the case itself had cost taxpayers more than $15 million.

Under these circumstances, could anyone say it was worth it?

“Oh no,” said Stanley Goldman, a professor at Loyola Law School. “How could you say it was worth it the way it was handled? Society has no business spending that amount of money on one proceeding like this.”

Yes, it was worth it, countered Phillip E. Johnson, professor of law at UC Berkeley. “You’ve got these accusations that people in charge of small children committed these horrible acts . . . and you’re going to say that it costs too much to look into it?”

But Johnson said he could also see it the other way. He said he agreed with other legal experts that the criminal case that became the nation’s longest and most costly was mishandled from the start.

Most of the experts agreed that Manhattan Beach police created hysteria in their initial investigation and that former Dist. Atty. Robert Philibosian erred by relying on therapists untrained in criminal investigative techniques to interview the alleged child victims.

He filed far too many charges, the experts said, creating an unwieldy case that overtaxed the judicial system.

Although judges occasionally trim the size of so-called mega-cases, such actions are rare. Most judges view their roles as relatively passive--settling questions as they arise.

As a result, Johnson said, “the conduct of the trial is very largely left to the parties. There is no real concept of the cost of procedure. It always seems, ‘Well, let’s have one more hearing. Why not?’ ”

Human Cost

In the McMartin case, the cost of all those hearings went beyond dollars and cents.

The childhoods of alleged victims were interrupted and some even came to an end while the case dragged on.

And in the end, it seemed the jury didn’t believe the children enough.

One 10-year-old boy spent 16 days on the witness stand during a preliminary hearing. Defense attorneys hammered away at his apparent mix of fact and fantasies that included tales of voyeurism and satanic rites. The boy’s ordeal led parents of most of the other 41 alleged victims to pull their children out of the case.

The chief defendant, Ray Buckey, spent five years in jail--about the same as he would have actually served under a 10-year prison sentence--before the jury was even asked to decide whether he was guilty. Although Buckey was presumed innocent, he still was jailed without bail when a succession of judges deemed him too dangerous to be out.

His mother, Peggy, spent two years in jail because of similar rulings.

Five other teachers at the now-defunct school experienced the hell of ostracism and the potential of prison for two years only to have charges dropped before the trial. They heard themselves pronounced “probably not guilty” by a new district attorney, Ira Reiner.

Like the Buckeys, all but one of the teachers had to sell their homes to pay their lawyers.

Wide Impact

“We’d be street people if it weren’t for friends,” Betty Raidor, one of the teachers, said recently.

“Yes,” added another, Mary Ann Jackson, “if we could find a street that would have us.”

The mother whose allegations started the case was among the three people who died. She apparently drank herself to death. One suspect, who was never formally charged, apparently died of a drug overdose after several children implicated him. A defense investigator killed himself the night before he was to testify.

But despite the parade of tragedies, useful things were learned, said James M. Peters, senior attorney for the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse.

Peters said the center, which trains prosecutors to handle such cases, grew out of the McMartin case and the “thousands” of other child-abuse cases that began to flood the nation’s consciousness and court calendars about the same time.

“McMartin was not the first day-care case around the county,” Peters said. “There were and continue to be sex-ring cases. . . . (But) the magnitude of this case was unprecedented.”

As a result, those involved in investigating and prosecuting it became “pioneers,” Peters said. “Lots of things went wrong.”

Manhattan Beach police, who handled the first complaint that a 2-year-old boy had been molested by “Mr. Ray,” decided to save time by sending a letter to other McMartin parents. The letter panicked them by informing them that their children may also have been molested, Peters said.

Parents frantic for answers alerted suspects to the investigation, giving them an opportunity to destroy incriminating evidence, if any existed.

Next, Peters and other experts said, the district attorney’s office erred by referring swarms of alarmed parents and their children to a little-known Los Angeles sex-abuse center, rather than to police.

Social workers at the center ultimately interviewed 384 children using therapeutic methods that Peters said were too leading for a criminal probe. More than 340 of the children told the social workers they were molested. Questions persisted that the social workers’ techniques helped blur the lines between fact and fantasy that sometimes cloud children’s accounts.

Even before reviewing all the social workers’ interviews, then-Dist. Atty. Philibosian took the case to the county grand jury, which indicted seven teachers on 115 counts. Shortly after that, Philibosian’s office doubled the number of charges.

Under a ruling in the late 1970s by the state Supreme Court, defendants indicted by a grand jury have the right to a preliminary hearing, unlike federal defendants whose cases go directly to trial. In the McMartin case, the preliminary hearing took an unprecedented 18 months. At the end, a judge determined there was enough evidence for all defendants to stand trial.

The Hearing

Pointing to the McMartin preliminary hearing as symptom of a system in need of reform, prosecutors throughout California currently are campaigning for an initiative known as the crime victims justice reform act that, among other things, would ban such hearings. If the initiative succeeds, the state system will conform to the federal.

Critics of the proposal suggest the McMartin trial might have been even longer and more cumbersome without a preliminary hearing. It was at the end of the preliminary hearing, they note, that Reiner decided to do what the preliminary hearing judge had not. He dropped charges against five of the defendants, calling the evidence against them “incredibly weak.”

“You tend to forget that five (more) people would have had to go through a three-year trial,” said Gerald F. Uelmen, dean of the School of Law at Santa Clara University. He blamed both the prosecution and the defense for the trial’s record length.

“A pox on both their houses,” Uelmen said. “They both probably over-tried the case.”

But most of the other experts saved their strongest criticism for the prosecution.

Although Reiner slashed the size of the case, they said he should have whittled it down even more.

Programmed to Fail?

“Probably they should have taken the 10 best counts they had and gone,” said Loyola’s Goldman. “You can only sentence people for so long. Why there had to be so many different counts . . . has always been a mystery to me, other than the fact it grabbed big headlines.”

The experts said the case was programmed to fail because American courts are not set up to handle cases with so many charges.

“We glorify our adversarial trial procedure,” said UCLA law professor Peter Arenella. “We assume it’s the most civilized and best. But we ignore the fact that we don’t use it to determine guilt in 75% to 90% of the criminal cases brought.

“I’m trying to suggest we have an unworkable trial system. That’s why we have so much plea bargaining (to avoid trials).”

But perhaps the case’s ultimate failure was that it could not answer to the jury’s satisfaction the question of what, if anything, really happened at the preschool.

When asked after the verdicts were announced, jurors said they believed some of the children were molested but were unsure by whom.

Times staff writer David Shaw contributed to this story.