Buckey’s Lawyer Says Reiner Is Seeking to Win Votes With Retrial

Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner was accused by Ray Buckey’s lawyer Thursday of attempting to boost his campaign for state attorney general by ordering a new trial for the McMartin Pre-School defendant on 13 charges of child molestation and conspiracy.

“It’s an expedient use of (the public’s) emotional confusion,” Danny Davis said in an interview the day after Deputy Dist. Atty. Roger Gunson announced Reiner’s decision to retry Buckey.

Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, were acquitted last month of 52 molestation counts after a 2 1/2-year trial, the longest criminal proceeding in U.S. history. The jury deadlocked on 13 other counts.

The decision to retry Ray Buckey was “not a political matter, but a matter of justice,” Reiner said Wednesday after Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William Pounders set the new trial for March 9.

Davis declined to speak to the media after a brief court hearing Thursday, but in a telephone interview he said Reiner was preying on the public’s “emotional backlash.”

The public outcry “could lead a politician to believe that continuing to prosecute in this case would be consistent with demonstrating that he is against molestation,” Davis said. “ . . . For politicians, a large vote for retrial would also mean a large emotional vote for the person who refiled the case.”

Davis noted that television polls found the public overwhelmingly opposed to the acquittals.

Reiner, running for attorney general in the June Democractic primary, could not be reached for comment Thursday. But on Wednesday he said politics was never an issue during hours of discussions in his office on retrying Buckey. Reiner said he decided to press the case to resolve the charges more clearly, because of the “seriousness of the offense” and the “feelings of the families, especially the children.”

The remaining charges involve five children allegedly molested at the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach between 1978 and 1984. Jurors in the first trial said the majority had voted for acquittal on all of the deadlocked counts.

Davis said the jury had more trouble deciding the 13 charges because it heard less evidence on those counts than on the 52 others. He said the prosecution at retrial will face the same problem it had in the first trial--proving that children were not prompted by parents, police or the social workers who interviewed them.

“I never felt any of these witnesses were appropriate for a criminal trial,” Davis said. “Their stories were too mixed with contamination and the unreal.” The defense attorney had told Pounders on Wednesday that he needed to clear “a number of obstacles” before retrying the case. But he said Thursday that he has no doubt that he will represent Buckey.

Reiner said late Thursday that Buckey could be retried on just five molestation charges. In remarks during taping of KNBC-TV’s weekend “News Conference” show, Reiner said only two of the remaining five alleged molestation victims have made strong commitments to testify at the retrial. He said a third alleged victim will not testify, and prosecutors will dismiss three molestation counts relating to her. He said it is doubtful a fourth alleged victim will testify.

Afterward, Reiner said prosecutors do not intend to call the fifth alleged victim, a boy whose mother triggered the case in 1983. If only two testify, Buckey would be retried on five counts, he said.