Sex Crimes
Updated:
The Great Prevaricator by
Lona Manning.
(Updated 05/29/07)
Edgar Smith,
with William F. Buckley Jr. blithely playing his stooge, wrote his way to
freedom from the Death House in Trenton State Prison in 1971, becoming the most
famous death-row prisoner of his time. Fourteen and-a-half years earlier, Smith
-- at age 23 -- had bludgeoned to death 15-year-old Vickie Zielinski in Mahwah,
N.J. Less than five years after his release from prison, Smith kidnapped a
petite but scrappy young mother who miraculously managed to escape from Smith's
car with a knife stuck in her side.
Updated:
Nightmare
at the Day Care: The Wee Care Case by Lona Manning.
(updated 01/14/07)
The Wee Care case
that sentenced Kelly Michaels to prison for 47 years was typical of the
child-abuse hysteria that gripped the United States in the 1980s. At the peak of
the frenzy of the great day-care witch hunt, it was the day-care workers, not
the preschoolers, who were at risk. As the preschoolers, urged on by overzealous
social workers, child therapists and prosecutors, told their incredible stories
of sexual abuse and satanic rituals in courtrooms across the United States,
scores of innocent people were sent off to prison. Some are still there.
Updated:
The
Forgotten Innocent Man by Lona Manning.
(Updated 10/16/06)
The courtroom testimony of twin 8-year-old boys – a concoction of fantasy and
fear – led to a life sentence for Robert Halsey in 1993. In 2004 the National
Center for Reason and Justice took up his case, but all of its appeals have been
denied and the Massachusetts Supreme Court has denied Halsey’s Application for
Further Appellate Review. Now in his 70s and in failing health, the former bus
driver will most likely die in prison, a victim of the child sexual-abuse
hysteria that put him there.
Pedophile Priest: The Crimes of Father Geoghan by
Denise Noe.
(12/01/03, updated 01/25/06)
Father
John Geoghan sexually molested young boys for over three decades with the full
knowledge of the Archdiocese of Boston. By the time Cardinal Bernard Law got
around to having him defrocked in 1993, Geoghan had become the poster boy for
the priest-pedophilia scandal that racked every Catholic diocese in the United
States.
The
Shame of Lorain, Ohio by Lona Manning. (updated 06/11/05)
The ritual abuse hysteria that swept across the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s
resulted in hundreds of innocent people being wrongfully convicted of committing
a bizarre concoction of sexual acts on preschoolers. Most of those convicted
were eventually freed from prison on appeal, but some innocent people remain
behind bars. One of the most blatant cases of wrongful conviction occurred in
Lorain, Ohio. There a politically ambitious prosecutor’s office coaxed and
manipulated a few Head Start preschoolers into testifying that they had been
sexually abused repeatedly over a six-month period by their bus driver and some
stranger -- two people who never even knew each other, but who are now serving
life prison terms for crimes that never occurred in the first place.
Rapist, M.D. by
Lona Manning.
(Updated 02/06/04)
It’s said that the Royal Canadian Mounties always get their
man -- but in this case justice was delayed for seven years, and the doctor
might never have answered for his crimes if it hadn’t been for one very
determined young woman who knew that her doctor had drugged her, raped her, and
somehow had managed to falsify his DNA to escape prosecution.
The Secret Life of a Sexual Predator by Lora
Lusher. Jack Bokin was bright and handsome, but his face he used as a mask. He
had a natural charm and a knack for making people laugh, although he had no
real friends. He ran his own plumbing business, was married and had two
children. As a child he had been something of a prodigy: a whiz at chess and
the piano. By age 10 he was also a sexual predator. His first victim was his
3-year-old cousin, his last – while he was out on bail after being charged
with raping and assaulting three other women –was a 19-year-old he bound,
raped repeatedly and beat for five hours before bashing in her skull with a
hammer, tying her up in a bag and dumping her into San Francisco Bay.
Sex Crimes and
Offenders by Lawrence A. Greenfeld. An Analysis of Data on Rape
and Sexual Assault.
Child Victimizers: Violent Offenders and their
Victims A study by Lawrence A. Greenfeld, a statistician for the U.S.
Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
DNA Exonerations
is based on a 1996 study by the U.S. Department of Justice that details 28 cases in which
men convicted of sex crimes, including murder, have been released as a result of
subsequent DNA testing. It will challenge your assumptions about such things as the
reliability of eye-witness testimony. Because of its length, we've broken the study
up into three parts. But it is a must read, for many reasons.
