“Thirty-three years ago, Fuster, along with his young wife, Ileana, was convicted of sexually abusing children at his suburban Florida home, where Ileana provided day care. He is the last person charged in the mass sex-abuse-in-day-care scares that made headlines from the 1980s to the mid ’90s to remain in prison. Part of a broader obsession with child sex abuse — therapist-induced repressed “memories” of incest destroyed thousands of families — the day-care cases were a modern version of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, down to allegations of Satanic rituals by caregivers. They stand as a warning to those who look condescendingly at our Salem ancestors, incredulous that judges and public alike would believe girls writhing and shrieking that they were at that moment being pinched by the accused sitting far away in the dock.”
Read the article in National Review by Rael Jean Isaac.
A while back I was contacted by supporters of a convicted Catholic priest, Father Joseph Maurizio. Subsequently, I exchanged a few letters with Father Joe.
The crucial question posed in the series “Global Child Rights and Wrongs” in the Sunday Guardian is how—and why—child protection laws should, over the past few decades, have led to the wrongful conviction of thousands of innocent parents and care givers world-wide, with devastating consequences for all concerned. The scale of these wrongful convictions would imply, if self-evidently, some unique malfunctioning of the legal system —a failure to fulfil its prime purpose of distinguishing guilt from innocence. To be sure, justice can miscarry—hence the opportunity provided by the appeal system to strike down judgements that, in the light of subsequent evidence, prove to be erroneous. But the situation here is quite different—a systematic (or systemic) miscarriage of justice entrenched within the legal system over many years.
