Retrial of Ray Buckey in McMartin Case Begins

A prosecutor in the second McMartin Pre-School trial told jurors Monday that he has not interviewed the three former pupils who claim they were molested and cannot predict how they will testify.

“I don’t know in what condition these children will come to you,” Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Joseph Martinez said in his opening statement. “I have not talked to them. They are now young ladies on the verge of puberty.

“I don’t know how much they will recall, how much they have repressed,” he said. But he urged jurors to “just remember they are children and they are telling about a very traumatic thing in a courtroom full of people. It’s very traumatic.”

The retrial of Ray Buckey is a case vastly diminished in scope from the scores of allegations that once enveloped the family-owned McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach and seven of its teachers. The school is now closed.

Martinez, who spoke for less than one hour, said he will prove his case through the testimony of parents, medical evidence and videotapes of the children’s controversial interviews with therapists in the case.

The same tapes, recorded at Children’s Institute International, were cited by jurors in Buckey’s first trial as evidence that children were coerced by therapists into making accusations against Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey. She is not being tried a second time.

Ray Buckey’s attorney, Danny Davis, told jurors they would see that the institute’s therapists asked leading questions and planted in the children’s minds the idea that they had been molested.

The first McMartin trial ended in January when a jury acquitted Mrs. Buckey of 12 charges. The same jurors acquitted the 31-year-old Buckey of 40 charges and deadlocked on 13 other counts.

The district attorney’s office decided to retry on eight counts involving three children, a greatly diminished number from the hundreds who were once said to have been molested at the school.

The first trial lasted nearly three years and cost $13 million, the longest and costliest criminal proceeding in U.S. history.

The second trial is expected to last about six months.

Martinez said he will show that Buckey once sat reading Playboy magazine in front of his preschool class.

Davis asserted that none of the children, of their own volition, ever accused Buckey of molesting them.

He promised that the defendant will take the stand, look jurors in the eyes and declare that he never molested anyone.

“You will have the opportunity to see this man charged with these heinous crimes, to look into his eyes and look into his soul,” Davis told the jury.

Outside court, Davis said he was shocked by Martinez’s statement that he had not interviewed the children.

He compared the prosecutors to World War II Japanese pilots on a suicidal mission with insufficient gas for a return flight.

“This is nothing but a kamikaze run before the primary (election),” Davis said, referring to Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner’s candidacy for California attorney general.

“There is no gas for a return trip for Ira Reiner,” he said.

Martinez, however, said he is confident of winning conviction.

“We feel we have the three best children and the eight best counts. You can’t get any better than that,” he said.