(44) Thu 16 Oct 97 18:32 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Snowden Case 1/2 St: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @EID:72f9 23509400 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00188903 The Snowden Case, at the Bar of Justice By Dorothy Rabinowitz 10/14/97 The Wall Street Journal On Sept. 12 the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the case of Grant Snowden, a former Miami police officer convicted 11 years ago on child sex-abuse charges brought by Dade County prosecutor Janet Reno. In her address to the three-judge panel, Assistant Attorney General Roberta Mandel made known her astonishment that a federal court could now be hearing further argument about this case. Indeed, the prosecutor informed Judges Harry Wellford, J.L. Edmondson and Thomas A. Clark, she didn't know what she was even doing up there -- a comment that brought a sharp retort from at least one judge. The assistant attorney general's remarks could have come as no great surprise to those acquainted with the history of the Snowden case, a history that could only have bred assurance that nothing would ever undo the conviction of this Florida citizen, dispatched to prison in 1986 to a sentence of five life terms. In years of appeals, no question -- not the quantities of hearsay allowed into evidence, nor the records showing the state's agent putting accusations in the children's mouths, not the false claims of medical evidence nor the trial's numerous similar features that virtually assured a verdict of guilty -- had ever moved any Florida court to take a second look at this conviction. Not for nothing did the assistant attorney general now exhibit an attitude suggesting that there was something approaching the unnatural about this court proceeding requiring the state to address serious queries about the case. Among these was the one put by one of the three appeals judges, who asked how it had come about that the state had actually put before the jury experts who vouched that the testimony of the accusing children was true -- a query the prosecutor had had some difficulty answering. The use of expert witnesses to tell a jury that other witnesses are telling the truth -- to say to jurors, thus, that the accused is guilty -- is of course strictly prohibited. They managed to do so, needless to say, because the trial judge had allowed it. Prior to this trial, winning a conviction against Grant Snowden had proved no easy matter. It had taken time, effort and single-minded prosecutors prepared to produce as many charges and new alleged victims as might be necessary to ensure a conviction. The case against Mr. Snowden, earlier described on these pages, began in 1984 -- a banner year for accusations and headlines about pedophile rings and sex abuse rampant in the nation's nursery schools. In Massachusetts that year, District Attorney Scott Harshbarger brought the first charges against the Amiraults, owners of the Fells Acres Day School in Malden. In Miami, a few weeks earlier, the office of Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno had begun amassing child sex-assault charges against police officer Grant Snowden -- one of several such prosecutions to advance Ms. Reno's reputation as an intrepid fighter and advocate for children. Officer Snowden would be accused, initially, of molesting a three-year-old boy -- a child cared for by his wife, who ran a baby-sitting service. By the time he was brought to trial two years later he was accused of assaulting two altogether different children. In the intervening period, Ms. Reno's office first dropped the charges involving the three-year-old, for lack of evidence. Which meant -- notwithstanding the Snowdens' ill-justified relief -- only that the state attorney's investigators would redouble their efforts to interrogate children about Grant, and what Grant might have done to them. Soon enough there came other charges -- and a prosecution -- based on the word of an 11-year-old that Mr. Snowden had attacked her in his home for three consecutive days, when she was four. So improbable was the case -- so indisputable the evidence that the child, cared for by entirely different baby-sitters, had come nowhere near the Snowdens -- that the jury returned an acquittal. The Snowdens enjoyed a brief period of rejoicing, before confronting the state's next prosecution; for the state attorney, they learned, was now preparing new charges and searching for new child witnesses. Grant Snowden was now, in short, in the system -- like numerous other citizens fated to be named abusers -- in which the first charge led, inevitably, to 10 or 30 or 40 more, the first alleged victim to crowds of victims. At the federal court last month, the assistant attorney general informed the judges that procedural obstacles should have barred their review of this case -- obstacles, New York appeals attorney Robert Rosenthal in turn explained, that the state had entirely invented. There was much argument on the question of procedural issues -- a matter that could not, needless to say, change the essential facts of this case, of which none was more essential than the way child witnesses came to produce accusations in the first place. The agent responsible for producing this testimony had come to Ms. Reno's attention as an expert in child sex abuse. Laurie Braga, whose degree was in speech -- but who would be presented to jurors as a psychologist -- was forthwith established in Ms. Reno's office, where she proceeded to interview children, including those whose testimony would be put before jurors in the Snowden case. Page after page of those interview transcripts reveal an interviewer impelled by a bottomless determination to get the four-year-old in question to say that Grant had done something sexual to her. A hard case. For the child had nothing to say about sex -- though she knew, as she said, from watching television, that Grant had done bad things. Further, she would reveal in a deposition, her mother told her to talk about Grant and to say that Grant had touched her -- and where. Nonetheless, in the interrogations at the state attorney's office, the child clearly had other matters on her mind. In the tortured odyssey packed with let's-pretend games, it would sometimes appear to the hopeful interrogator that the child was about to make some telling disclosure. Interrogator: "You were watching TV and then what would happen?" Child: "And then Grant came up. . . ." Interrogator: "Uh-huh?" Child: "And shut off the TV." What did Grant do then? Did he sit and play with her? the interviewer wished to know. He did nothing, the child informed her, and he had turned off the TV "because he can't sleep." And this had upset her, the child says. Again and again, the child returns, on her own, to the same vital matter -- one thing that she herself had experienced, that no one had suggested to her or caused her to recite through make-believe with dolls: namely, that Grant had turned off the TV set. What with numerous variations of You know what happened? Grant, when I was watching TV, he turned off the TV and I cried, and no indication the child would ever mention sex abuse, Ms. Braga took matters in hand. She now offered the child, who had repeatedly said earlier that Grant Snowden had done nothing to her, rich lists of sexual activities, played out on a doll, from which she could choose: -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 218/890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (45) Thu 16 Oct 97 18:32 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Snowden Case 2/2 St: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @EID:7209 23509400 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00188905 "Did he rub his penis outside or put it inside . . . did he put his penis here, or did he put his penis here or did he put his penis in your mouth? Where else?" In all the lists offered the four-year-old in this interrogation presumably designed to elicit the facts, one option was notably absent -- the choice, that is, that nothing sexual had happened. To enter children into these interrogations was to ensure that they would come away, after repeated exposure to the lists, to the exhaustive sexual scenarios, with an advanced education. This was an education of no little value to prosecutors who would later come before jurors, as at the trials of Mr. Snowden, the Amiraults and others, and ask how on earth small children could possibly have knowledge of the grossly detailed sexual activities they talked about, if they had not experienced them at the hands of the molesters? A potent argument, particularly to jurors allowed -- as they were at the second Snowden trial -- to hear experts, in the guise of scientific authority, instructing them that the child witnesses could only be telling the truth. By ruling such testimony admissible, the judge had violated a bedrock legal principle: Expert witnesses are forbidden from bolstering the testimony of other witnesses precisely because they come before the jury as authorities having special knowledge. Ms. Braga, put forward as a psychologist and an expert in child development -- the same interrogator who had developed the four-year-old's testimony -- was nevertheless permitted to tell jurors that children could not make up stories about abuse. Another state witness, Simon Miranda, came introduced as an expert in child sex abuse. Not for nothing did the prosecutor sum up at the trial's end, with a reminder to jurors of Dr. Miranda's testimony: to wit, that "99.5% of children" making accusations of abuse were telling the truth. A remarkable pronouncement -- but one the jurors heard from the mouth of a witness given the court's imprimatur as an expert. Who were they to doubt the word of these experts? The impact on jurors of such testimony, the accusations presented as having come from the child witness -- who had visited the prosecutors' office so many times, she said she would miss going there -- could hardly be underestimated. The state may have had its problems, earlier, obtaining a conviction against Officer Snowden; but in this trial, it was soon clear, the hard times were over. Here, the prosecution had a medical expert (Dorothy Hicks, director of Jackson Memorial Hospital's rape trauma treatment center) to testify that the child had contracted a venereal disease -- Gardnerella vaginitis, an infection also transmittable through nonsexual contact. Whether the child in fact had the condition at all would remain a question, Dr. Hicks having destroyed the test-slide evidence. Further, Dr. Hicks had tested for the disease using a sample of vaginal discharge from the child -- a discharge, according to the child's parent, present in the girl two years before she had ever met the Snowdens. All this notwithstanding, the jurors were informed that thanks to this expert witness, they had authoritative medical evidence of Mr. Snowden's guilt. Nor was any authority allowed to rebut the claim of medical evidence, of such crucial importance to the jury. For the trial judge, Amy Steele Donner, ruled that the defense could not present its medical expert, Max Bertholf, associate director of residency at Roanoke Memorial Hospital and a specialist in research on the diagnosis of sexually transmitted diseases. The judge -- who would confer authority on such experts as Ms. Braga -- ruled that Dr. Bertholf was insufficiently qualified to testify, because he was, as Judge Donner put it, not an expert in the diagnosis of sexually transmitted diseases in children -- a specialty that does not exist. The procedures for diagnosing such diseases are the same for children as for adults, as Dr. Bertholf had in vain informed the judge. The jurors, therefore, were not allowed to hear the defense expert testify to the notorious unreliability of the diagnostic test used by Dr. Hicks -- a test that, according to Dr. Bertholf, yielded inaccurate results at least 50% of the time. Neither would the judge permit jurors to hear of Mr. Snowden's acquittal at the earlier trial. Lawyers for the defendant would be prohibited from mentioning the defendant's model career as a police officer. The prosecutor, who began his summation by announcing, "We are here because this man raped two kids," was allowed to tell jurors of crimes that had not even been alleged. The child, he assured jurors, "wouldn't talk about the anal rape . . . because those things are more horrible for a four-year-old to talk about than a finger." These were the last words the jurors heard, suggesting to them that the defendant had committed sex crimes far more terrible than they had been allowed to know. The first accusation against Mr. Snowden, made two years earlier, came after an encounter with the father of the three-year-old -- a boy dropped off for baby-sitting bearing suspicious welts. Not long after Mr. Snowden warned the father, also a police officer, that he would report the matter to child welfare authorities if the child ever again appeared in that condition, the man charged Mr. Snowden with sexual abuse of his son. A therapist to whom the boy was brought would later report she found it necessary to warn the father to cease pressuring his son to say that Grant had abused him. The state attorney's prosecutors -- who had found so little evidence for this fateful first charge that they did not try for an indictment -- nevertheless presented the boy at the Snowden trial two years later. There, along with another child having nothing to do with the case, he was permitted to testify to "prior bad acts." In sum, despite its earlier difficulties, the state had, in this trial, the prosecution that could not fail. The six jurors in short order returned a guilty verdict. In Florida's South Bay Correctional Facility today, former police officer Grant Snowden -- now Prisoner No. 102495 -- thinks, not always willingly, about the world from which he was taken in 1986. He still sees himself in that world, frozen in time. "I still think of my daughter being 11, my son being 15," he reflects. In his mind's eye he can picture himself with his wife and those children next to him, all of them riding around in the Chevrolet. It is best, he has learned over these years, to limit the flow of these images -- best to keep occupied and focused on the uncertain present. In 1983, when he was still Officer Snowden, he had been sitting in his vehicle working the midnight shift when he noticed in an old station wagon going by, two men with a woman between them in the front seat. Something about the look in the woman's eyes had troubled him. He followed the wagon, looking for a good reason to pull it over, and found one, finally, when the driver made an illegal turn. The woman, it turned out, had been raped and robbed by the two men, who had stopped her car at a red light and forced their way in, threatening her with a gun. When Mr. Snowden got the suspects out of the car, he found a back seat stained with the woman's blood. For this arrest and rescue, Mr. Snowden, already much decorated, was named Officer of the Year. The woman's attackers received 15 years. It would not have been conceivable to Mr. Snowden then that he would one day be in prison, given a sentence of five life terms for assaults that never took place, and that he would meet there, as he did, one of the rapists he had put away for 15 years - - the sort of encounter that can make for an uncertain present. Shortly before the beginning of the oral argument before the 11th Circuit, 75-year-old Violet Amirault died, at home in Massachusetts, attended by her daughter. She had not lived long enough to see the undoing of the case against her and her children. Commenting on this, Boston attorney Harvey Silverglate (who does not represent the Amiraults) observed: "The government's ability to deprive people of their freedom is the single most awesome power government has. When that engine starts speeding down the track, powered by a myth, it is extraordinarily difficult to stop -- until the courts recognize the myth." The undoing of the Snowden conviction, which Florida prosecutors have so successfully preserved these many years, is now before the federal judges. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 218/890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001