Little Lies Reveal Big Flaw in the System

Everyone is saying how awful it is that Eric Nordmark spent eight months in jail awaiting trial based on charges fabricated by three young girls that he attacked them in the park. The cops feel bad, the prosecutors feel bad, the girls feel bad.

Imagine how Nordmark feels.

I don’t doubt the girls’ remorse, to the extent they grasp the nature of their misdeed. Nor am I suggesting that cops and prosecutors are shedding crocodile tears. But if they’d really wanted to be sure early on that they had the right guy, there was a way to do it: Prosecutors could have had the girls, then 11, testify at the preliminary hearing, held five weeks after the alleged incident on May 15 of last year.

Instead, they fell back on Proposition 115 that was passed 57% to 43% by California voters in 1990. Among its provisions, the initiative allows police to provide hearsay evidence at preliminary hearings in place of victim testimony. The rationale was to shorten hearings and spare victims from having to testify twice if the defendant was bound over for trial.

A nice thought, and I realize I’m automatically “soft on crime” for being against the idea, but once upon a time in America we had a notion about defendants’ rights, too. One of them was that a phony case wouldn’t make it to trial.

That almost certainly would have happened in the Nordmark case, who instead was bound over for trial without a single word of testimony from the only witnesses to the alleged crime. A transient unable to post bail, he languished in jail until late January, when the case collapsed after the first girl to testify had spent a day on the witness stand.

Before she came back for a second day, she revealed to her mother that the allegations were bogus.

David Swanson, who represented Nordmark at his trial, agrees that the case likely would have collapsed months earlier if the girls had testified at the prelim.

“This [Nordmark case] is a direct result of Prop. 115 -- these laws that bend over backward to protect the quote-unquote victims,” Swanson says.

“Any time you advance their rights, you infringe on the defendant’s rights. I guess there’s a happy medium somewhere, but certainly not in this case. Had those girls been brought into the preliminary hearing, I’m assuming they never would have made it through it. They would have broken at some point.”

Swanson, who didn’t represent Nordmark until after the preliminary hearing, said Proposition 115 “basically turns preliminary hearings into almost a meaningless exercise.”

Police typically just read from their original reports on the incident and are allowed to testify as to what the victims told them. Despite police and prosecutor claims that the girls were highly credible, Swanson says there were many holes and inconsistencies in their stories.

Trials are meant to expose such things. Preliminary hearings serve an admittedly different purpose.

However, when children are the only witnesses in a case that is far from airtight, it seems to me they should be required to testify.

For those who think I’m coldhearted, I suggest you direct your scorn at police and prosecutors who, failing to get the truth from the girls, put them in a position where they’d have to testify eventually.

Better late than never for Nordmark, 36, who told The Times after his release he’d planned to kill himself with a razor blade if he’d been falsely convicted.

No one wants to see young girls squirming on a witness stand.

But when did we lose our squeamishness about possibly innocent people squirming for months in a jail cell?

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana. parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.