Son Wants Man to Stay in Prison

A man who has spent the past 19 years in prison for crimes he says he didn’t commit faced his greatest obstacle to freedom Wednesday: his son.

As John Stoll sat at the defense table, Jed Stoll, a grim-faced 25-year-old carpet layer from Maryland, testified that his father repeatedly molested him when he was a child.

Similar testimony 20 years earlier helped send John Stoll to prison for 40 years. The son told a rapt courtroom Wednesday that his father should stay there. “I want to make sure he can’t get out and hurt anybody else,” Jed Stoll said.

Prosecutors in 1984 contended the elder Stoll was the leader of a ring of molesters and child pornographers who abused at least a half dozen children in their middle-class neighborhood. Investigators said adults gave children drugs, then filmed sex parties with them, though no film or pictures were ever found.

The hearing to determine whether Stoll should get a new trial or win his freedom was called after four of the six original alleged victims recently came forward to say they were never touched. They now say they testified against Stoll when Bakersfield was in the midst of what some critics later called a witch-hunt hysteria over child abuse, and after over-zealous prosecutors and investigators coerced and even threatened them. The fifth alleged victim testified in January he has no memory of abuse, making Stoll’s son the key witness.

Stoll’s attorneys had hoped Jed Stoll, who had refused to respond to their efforts to contact him, would either not testify or support his father. Those hopes were dashed when he took the stand, a stocky man with a ponytail.

He said he can’t remember details of what happened, but insisted that his father molested him. Under defense questioning, he couldn’t remember the names of childhood playmates who also testified at the trial, or what he said on the witness stand.

John Stoll’s attorneys say it’s not surprising the son turned out to be his father’s chief antagonist. When the child abuse allegations surfaced in 1984, Stoll and his ex-wife were involved in a bitter child custody fight. Stoll’s attorneys contend the ex-wife planted a deep dislike of his father in the son.

In the mid-1980s, law enforcement authorities in Bakersfield identified eight alleged child abuse rings. Although dozens of people ultimately were convicted and went to prison, many of the convictions were reversed on appeal. A 1986 investigation by the state attorney general’s office faulted not only the questioning techniques but the failure of investigators to look for independent evidence supporting the children’s stories. The lead investigator, Conny Ericsson, admitted he never took the children for medical exams, even though Jed Stoll testified that he had been sodomized two weeks before his father’s arrest, Stoll’s attorneys said.

Two years ago, attorneys for the California Innocence Project from San Diego and Santa Clara began looking into the case and eventually took it on.

During his cross-examination of Jed Stoll, Justin Brooks, an attorney for Project Innocence, read from a transcript of the 1984 testimony in which the son repeatedly admitted lying on the witness stand. Jed Stoll said Wednesday he couldn’t remember whether he lied or not.

The hearing could wrap up Friday with testimony from a prosecution expert on children’s memories. Judge John Kelly could take several weeks to rule on whether Stoll should get a new trial, gain his freedom, or stay in prison.