AP headline:
Anti-Tax Group Hires Paroled Sex Offender
Followed by this:
A man who spent 18 years in jail after being convicted of raping eight children at a day care where he worked has been hired by an anti-tax group.
Gerald Amirault was convicted in 1986 of molesting and raping 3- and 4-year-old children at the Fells Acres day care center he and his family ran in Malden, a city north of Boston. Amirault, who maintains his innocence, was released on parole last year.
Citizens for Limited Taxation has hired Amirault as a researcher at its Marblehead office. Barbara Anderson, the anti-tax group's executive director, said she believes Amirault was unjustly convicted and will be an enthusiastic employee.
But here's the real
story, from
WSJ.com:
Friday, April 30, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
At 10 o'clock this morning, Gerald Amirault will walk out of his Massachusetts jail, a free man.
It is a joyous day for this prisoner, behind bars for 18 years after his 1986 conviction on charges of child sex abuse based on fantastical testimony dragged from pre-schoolers. Gerald's mother Violet and his sister Cheryl served eight years before their convictions were overturned in 1995.
It is also a happy day for The Wall Street Journal. Readers of this page will be familiar with Dorothy Rabinowitz's accounts of judicial abuse of the Amirault family and others falsely convicted of child sex abuse during a wave of irrational cases that swept the courts in the 1980s....
One of the reasons behind the district attorney's decision last week not to oppose Mr. Amirault's release on parole was that in order to have him classified as a "sexually dangerous person" there would have had to be a virtual re-trial of the entire Amirault case. The DA had to have been deterred by the prospect of parading into a courtroom with the incredible fantasies extracted from Mr. Amirault's alleged victims--about secret rooms, magic drinks, animal butchery, assaults by a bad clown. Then-District Attorney Scott Harshbarger had offered them as "proof" of the Amiraults' guilt.
No liberal bias at the Associated Press, right?
