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OPINION JANUARY 14, 2010, 10:35 P.M. ET
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Martha Coakley’s Convictions
The role played by the U.S. Senate candidate in a notorious sex case raises questions about her judgment.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
The story of the Amiraults of Massachusetts, and of the prosecution that had turned the lives of this thriving
American family to dust, was well known to the world by the year 2001. It was well known, especially, to District
Attorney Martha Coakley, who had by then arrived to take a final, conspicuous, role in a case so notorious as to
assure that the Amiraults’ name would be known around the globe.
The Amiraults were a busy, confident trio, grateful in the way of people who have found success after a life of
hardship. Violet had reared her son Gerald and daughter Cheryl with help from welfare, and then set out to
educate herself. The result was the triumph of her life—the Fells Acres school—whose every detail Violet
scrutinized relentlessly. Not for nothing was the pre-school deemed by far the best in the area, with a long waiting
list for admission.
All of it would end in 1984, with accusations of sexual assault and an ever-growing list of parents signing their
children on to the case. Newspaper and television reports blared a sensational story about a female school
principal, in her 60s, who had daily terrorized and sexually assaulted the pupils in her care, using sharp objects as
her weapon. So too had Violet’s daughter Cheryl, a 28-year old teacher at the school.
But from the beginning, prosecutors cast Gerald as chief predator—his gender qualifying him, in their view, as the
best choice for the role. It was that role, the man in the family, that would determine his sentence, his treatment,
and, to the end, his prosecution-inspired image as a pervert too dangerous to go free.
The accusations against the Amiraults might well rank as the most astounding ever to be credited in an American
courtroom, but for the fact that roughly the same charges were brought by eager prosecutors chasing a similar
headline—making cases all across the country in the 1980s. Those which the Amiraults’ prosecutors brought had
nevertheless, unforgettable features: so much testimony, so madly preposterous, and so solemnly put forth by the
state. The testimony had been extracted from children, cajoled and led by tireless interrogators.
Gerald, it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then
had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was
doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which
had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury. Violet had tied a boy to a tree in front of the school one bright
afternoon, in full view of everyone, and had assaulted him anally with a stick, and then with “a magic wand.” She
would be convicted of these charges. Cheryl had cut the leg off a squirrel.
Other than such testimony, the prosecutors had no shred of physical or other proof that could remotely pass as
evidence of abuse. But they did have the power of their challenge to jurors: Convict the Amiraults to make sure
the battle against child abuse went forward. Convict, so as not to reject the children who had bravely come
forward with charges.
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Gerald was sent to prison for 30 to 40 years, his mother and sister sentenced to eight to 20 years. The prosecutors
celebrated what they called, at the time “a model, multidisciplinary prosecution.” Gerald’s wife, Patricia, and their
three children—the family unfailingly devoted to him—went on with their lives. They spoke to him nightly and
cherished such hope as they could find, that he would be restored to them.
Hope arrived in 1995, when Judge Robert Barton ordered a new trial for the women. Violet, now 72, and Cheryl
had been imprisoned eight years. This toughest of judges, appalled as he came to know the facts of the case,
ordered the women released at once. Judge Barton—known as Black Bart for the long sentences he gave
criminals—did not thereafter trouble to conceal his contempt for the prosecutors. They would, he warned, do all
in their power to hold on to Gerald, a prediction to prove altogether accurate.
No less outraged, Superior Court Judge Isaac Borenstein presided over a widely publicized hearings into the case
resulting in findings that all the children’s testimony was tainted. He said that “Every trick in the book had been
used to get the children to say what the investigators wanted.” The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly—which had
never in its 27 year history taken an editorial position on a case—published a scathing one directed at the
prosecutors “who seemed unwilling to admit they might have sent innocent people to jail for crimes that had
never occurred.”
It was clear, when Martha Coakley took over as the new Middlesex County district attorney in 1999, that public
opinion was running sharply against the prosecutors in the case. Violet Amirault was now gone. Ill and penniless
after her release, she had been hounded to the end by prosecutors who succeeded in getting the Supreme Judicial
Court to void the women’s reversals of conviction. She lay waiting all the last days of her life, suitcase packed, for
the expected court order to send her back to prison. Violet would die of cancer before any order came in
September 1997.
That left Cheryl alone, facing rearrest. In the face of the increasing furor surrounding the case, Ms. Coakley
agreed to revise and revoke her sentence to time served—but certain things had to be clear, she told the press.
Cheryl’s case, and that of Gerald, she explained, had nothing to do with one another—a startling proposition given
the horrific abuse charges, identical in nature, of which all three of the Amiraults had been convicted.
No matter: When women were involved in such cases, the district attorney explained, it was usually because of
the presence of “a primary male offender.” According to Ms. Coakley’s scenario, it was Gerald who had dragged
his mother and sister along. Every statement she made now about Gerald reflected the same view, and the
determination that he never go free. No one better exemplified the mindset and will of the prosecutors who
originally had brought this case.
Before agreeing to revise Cheryl’s sentence to time served, Ms. Coakley asked the Amiraults’ attorney, James
Sultan, to pledge—in exchange—that he would stop representing Gerald and undertake no further legal action on
his behalf. She had evidently concluded that with Sultan gone—Sultan, whose mastery of the case was complete—
any further effort by Gerald to win freedom would be doomed. Mr. Sultan, of course, refused.
In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor’s Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a commutation of Gerald’s
sentence. After nine months of investigation, the board, reputed to be the toughest in the country, voted 5-0, with
one abstention, to commute his sentence. Still more newsworthy was an added statement, signed by a majority of
the board, which pointed to the lack of evidence against the Amiraults, and the “extraordinary if not bizarre
allegations” on which they had been convicted.
Editorials in every major and minor paper in the state applauded the Board’s findings. District Attorney Coakley
was not idle either, and quickly set about organizing the parents and children in the case, bringing them to
meetings with Acting Gov. Jane Swift, to persuade her to reject the board’s ruling. Ms. Coakley also worked the
press, setting up a special interview so that the now adult accusers could tell reporters, once more, of the tortures
they had suffered at the hands of the Amiraults, and of their panic at the prospect of Gerald going free.
On Feb. 20, 2002, six months after the Board of Pardons issued its findings, the governor denied Gerald’s
commutation.
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Gerald Amirault spent nearly two years more in prison before being granted parole in 2004. He would be
released, with conditions not quite approximating that of a free man. He was declared a level three sex offender—
among the consequences of his refusal, like that of his mother and sister, to “take responsibility” by confessing his
crimes. He is required to wear, at all times, an electronic tracking device; to report, in a notebook, each time he
leaves the house and returns; to obey a curfew confining him to his home between 11:30 p.m. and 6 a.m. He may
not travel at all through certain areas (presumably those where his alleged victims live). He can, under these
circumstances, find no regular employment.
The Amirault family is nonetheless grateful that they are together again.
Attorney General Martha Coakley—who had proven so dedicated a representative of the system that had brought
the Amirault family to ruin, and who had fought so relentlessly to preserve their case—has recently expressed her
view of this episode. Questioned about the Amiraults in the course of her current race for the U.S. Senate, she told
reporters of her firm belief that the evidence against the Amiraults was “formidable” and that she was entirely
convinced “those children were abused at day care center by the three defendants.”
What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general
of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults
to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated
squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is
little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley’s concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—
her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.
If the sound of ghostly laughter is heard in Massachusetts these days as this campaign rolls on, with Martha
Coakley self-portrayed as the guardian of justice and civil liberties, there is good reason.
Ms. Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal’s editorial board, is the author of “No Crueler Tyrannies:
Accusations, False Witness And Other Terrors Our Times” (Free Press, 2003).
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